The Need for Tailored Support for Long-Term Students in Informatics Bachelor’s Programmes

Long-term students in higher education are characterised by extended study durations well beyond the expected or typical completion time. Extended study durations pose a persistent problem to higher education institutions in Austria, as they rely on their students graduating in a timely manner for budgetary reasons. Despite the importance of the issue, long-term students are currently an understudied topic in higher education research. This paper investigates subgroups of long-term students and discusses potential barriers to successful graduation. The data used for this study are administrative records from a technical university which include enrolment information, exams, and grades. There are 50 cases of registered students (as of August 2023) who enrolled in the Software and Information Engineering (SIE) bachelor’s programme between 2011 and 2016, have completed over 160 ECTS points, and have neither graduated nor dropped out. Results indicate there is a subgroup among the long-term students struggling with the bachelor thesis while others struggle with specific exams, either repeatedly failing or not attempting them. A subgroup of these students is continually active, completing only one or two courses each semester but doing so persistently. The university records, unfortunately, do not contain any information on why this is the case since the data only contain information on the long-term students’ academic performance and administrative status. To shed some light on the issue, a representative sample of long-term students would need to be surveyed and asked about their living circumstances. The findings show that not all students who study for a long time without graduating need help, while others struggle, especially with the bachelor thesis. This illustrates that a more fine-grained understanding of the reasons for extended study duration is required if universities want to develop support structures for long-term students that actually meet their needs.