Abstract:

Access to education, equal opportunities in education represent attractive needs which unfortunately can encounter many obstacles in real life (economic, social, cultural), causing disadvantaged students to have limited access to secondary education and increasingly restricted access to university studies. Moreover, given the context of the current year’s COVID-19 pandemic, access to university education for students from disadvantaged groups was expected to be alarmingly diminishing. In this respect, within a project carried out in 2020 in our university, we aimed at performing activities in order to promote the educational offer and to get acquainted with the specifics of student life. Conducted entirely online, they aimed to increase the degree of access to academic studies for students from disadvantaged groups in the geographical area from which our university usually selects its students. We performed an ascertaining research carried out by means of a questionnaire method on a convenience sample of 110 students from disadvantaged categories which constitute the project’s target group.
The purpose of the hereby study is to know the set of expectations of final-year high-school students from the university life, as a future opportunity to access our university courses (so that it can proactively prepare to receive them, providing improved services available to them, meeting their expectations as much as possible). The hypothesis of our study is that, at the level of the group of investigated students, there is a discrepancy between their representation regarding the complex approach towards university studies and the university offer.

The categories of indicators targeted in the study through the items in the structure of the questionnaire are the following:
1. students’ knowledge of their own intentions to pursue university studies (self-knowledge);
2. identifying the sources to find out about the university offer (information);
3. highlighting the obstacles expected to occur during studies (barriers);
4. highlighting the main categories of needs estimated during the studies and their intensity (needs);
5. awareness of the main fears related to the future student life (fears).

The collected and analyzed data highlight two sets of conclusions: 1. those concerning the perception of students from disadvantaged groups about the obstacles, expectations and fears related to a potential future student life; 2. those regarding a series of measures which the university can anticipate for the academic year 2021-2022 according to these data.

Keywords:

Education, equal opportunities, career decision, disadvantaged student.