Another freshman programme – Will it work this time?

After freshman programmes were banished from university curricula for nearly two and a half decades, the Ethiopian Ministry of Science and Higher Education has decided to reintroduce them as of the new academic year beginning October 2019.

This decision is drawn from the recommendations of Ethiopia’s new Education Development Roadmap (Ministry of Education, 2018) that incorporates different policy directions set to chart the future of the national education system in the years to come.

A variety of justifications have been offered for the reintroduction of the freshman programme. In respect of students, the hope is that it can address their lack of knowledge and skill, poor communication abilities, poor understanding of global and local events and developments, poor ethical and moral standards, lack of individual and social responsibilities, and limited preparation towards employability (Ministry of Education, 2018).

The overall assumption is that the new arrangement will assist in improving the quality of education and preparation of graduates for the job market, in addition to fostering positive relationships among students of different ethnic background.

Background

The reintroduction of the freshman programme into the higher education system has a long history. It was first proposed as a panacea for the high dropout rates of students joining the country’s flagship higher education institution – Addis Ababa University – in its early years.

The first proposal came in the early years of the 1960s from an ad hoc subcommittee set up by the then university president to tackle the problem of attrition, without sacrificing quality of education.

The committee recommended the opening of a “pre-college year” or “year of general studies” with the aim of strengthening the educational foundations of students, offering strong remedial courses in basic subjects, giving university teachers the chance to evaluate students on a full year basis, and helping students to make informed choices with respect to their fields of specialisation at the end of the year (Trudeau, 1966).

The same recommendation was endorsed by the curriculum committee of the University Faculty Council in 1963, which included, among its other proposals, the introduction of what it called “general education courses” to be given to all freshman students for a minimum of 31 credits.

According to Trudeau, the areas from which the courses were to be drawn included communication skills, social sciences, humanities, mathematics and natural sciences. A comprehensive course titled “Survey of Ethiopia” was especially recommended to familiarise all students with various aspects of Ethiopian cultural heritage, and social and political institutions, despite a lack of specific plans for organising and scheduling the courses.

Limited preparations

The proposal was approved on a trial basis by the executive committee of the university but was interrupted after the end of the 1963-64 academic year, due to the limited preparation made and the complaints lodged from some colleges that feared that such a policy would force them to lengthen their training periods.

It is to be noted that student retention has been a perennial problem of the Ethiopian higher education system since the early years of the sector’s history. For instance, the dropout rate at Addis Ababa University between 1950 and the mid-sixties was around 40%. The rate of attrition was 50.5% among science students compared with 40% for arts students (Wagaw, 1990).

According to Wagaw, there were a variety of academic and non-academic reasons such as lack of appropriate orientation and counselling, lack of sound academic preparation at high school, forced choice of fields of studies, and poor language skills that accounted for the high dropout rate at Addis Ababa University.

The problem of attrition was so pervasive that in 1969 the university administration had to set up a specific freshman programme with its own administrative unit to develop student skills in language, conceptualisation and reasoning (Wagaw, 1990).

The full year of the freshman programme introduced focused on offering general and preparatory courses before students chose their areas of studies in their second year. The grades students earned in their first year also determined whether they would be allowed to study their choices of programmes during their second year.

This arrangement did not immediately alter the rate of attrition at universities. For instance, the attrition rate at Addis Ababa University and at Alemaya University of Agriculture in 1982-83 averaged about 20%. The figure went down to 9.7 % at Addis Ababa University and 5% at Alemaya University of Agriculture only in 1985-86 after a new supplemental examination (a repeated examination given during vacation time to enable low achievers to get promoted) went into effect in 1984-85 (UNESCO, 1988).

Abandoning the programme

The freshman programme was abruptly interrupted in the initial years of the incumbent government and resulted in the reduction of the four-year undergraduate degree programmes to three years.

The government’s resolve to abandon the freshman programme was accompanied by the decision to take the contents down to Grades 11 and 12 at the senior high school or preparatory levels despite the apparent lack of qualified staff, materials and infrastructural facilities at those levels.

Some argue that the decision was influenced by political rather than academic reasons. The belief that university curricula in Ethiopia are most often affected by political motives is not uncommon, but has escalated over the last four decades.

While the abandonment of the freshman programme may have assisted the expansion of higher education by creating more spaces for new students, most observers agree that the negative effects of this decision on the quality of students became prevalent soon after the programme was abandoned.

New directions?

With few exceptions, the nature, purpose and content of courses to be introduced now are very similar to the freshman programme before it was discontinued.

The courses to be introduced in the new academic year are listed as: critical thinking; general psychology; global trends; economics; communicative English; Ethiopian geography and the Horn; Ethiopian history and the Horn; mathematics; physical education; introduction to emerging technology; anthropology; entrepreneurship; moral and civics; and inclusiveness.

With the exception of courses such as critical thinking, anthropology, inclusiveness and emerging technology which will be introduced for the first time, the courses are not new. The ministry has been making the necessary preparations towards initiating the programme, which will lengthen the existing three-year programmes to four. This includes organising awareness sessions, workshops, and module preparation with the involvement of pertinent institutions and experts.

While the academic motives for the reintroduction of the freshman programme essentially remain the same, what is new is the belief that a good knowledge of basic courses and the country’s past in general will contribute to building a sense of national unity, citizenship and social cohesion among students.

The new arrangement appears to have been happily received by most stakeholders, with the accompanying regret that it should not have been abandoned in the first place.

However, the next few years will determine whether current aspirations and policy directions will be sustainable and executed in a manner that will produce the desired effects.

Wondwosen Tamrat is an associate professor and founding president of St Mary’s University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, an affiliate scholar of the Programme for Research on Private Higher Education at the State University of New York at Albany, United States, and coordinator of the private higher education sub-cluster of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa. He may be reached at preswond@smuc.edu.et or wondwosentamrat@gmail.com.