Career guidance and student success in Dutch higher vocational education

Abstract

To enhance student success, a growing number of vocational education and training institutions in the Netherlands are nowadays implementing new career guidance practices in their competence-based approaches to learning. Based on individual-level data of undergraduate first-year full-time students from a Dutch university of applied sciences, this study investigated the influence of career guidance on first-year student success given other known influences such as prior academic performance, faculty and gender. First of all, students obtained more credits in the competence-based educational system in which they from 2006 are guided. Furthermore, students who completed their first year not only obtained more credits after career guidance was introduced in 2006, but at the same time scored substantially higher first-grade points in their first year of study compared to students who left during the first six months.