HOW FAR IS THE DEGREE? COMPLETION RATE IN INFORMATICS STUDIES

Higher education in the Czech Republic has for a long time lacked a fixed long-term concept. But what is common to all the directions of its development is the effort to spend the state budget appropriately on educating youth. In this context, there are a number of problems that need to be addressed. One of the most serious is currently the demographic development in Czech society and the associated drop in the number of potential applicants for university studies. Another important issue is how to motivate those students who have already been admitted to successfully complete their studies, thus eliminating unnecessarily spent funds not only for students who fail to complete their studies, but also for students who attempt to study repeatedly, the so-called Recycled Students.

Similar researches devoted to analysis of competition rate are realized in the world and one of the important is the research realized by National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which is processed amount more than 2 million of US students. Results are mentioned the following picture. As we see, the overall competition rate is approximately 67%.

A situation where the number of potential applicants for university studies is constantly decreasing due to demographic developments leads these institutions to take greater care of the students they have already acquired and to support the successful completion of their studies. In our contribution, we focused on monitoring the following two success indicators for studies: the “Completion Rate” and “Time to Degree”. For the analysis we used the data from the university system of the University of Economics, Prague and analyzed the data of the students of information technology courses of the Master’s program at the Faculty of Informatics and Statistics in the years 2010-2012.

We have determined for the information technology FIS UEP study fields that:
• The value of the “Completion Rate” indicator is between 82.18% and 87.4% in the surveyed period between 2010 and 2012, which, as shown by the discussion, corresponds to the values measured in other European countries;
• For distance studies of fields with the same specialization, it is then 58.2% for 2011 and 52.1% for 2012; it follows that the “Completion Rate” is significantly lower in the case of distance studies than for full-time studies.
For the second indicator “Time to Degree”, the following values were determined for the surveyed period 2010 – 2012:
• The time spent by students of information technology fields in successfully completing their studies was in a relatively consistent interval of between 5.26 and 5.29 semesters in the surveyed period; for distance studies, the completion time is very similar at 5.3. semesters to 5.40 semesters;
• The time period of unsuccessful studies is striking; in the case of full-time studies, this is a period of 3.77-4.18 semesters; in the case of distance studies, then, from 3.00 to 3.15 semesters; this time, both in full-time and distance learning, is very long and suggests that the nature of the credit system allows for longer studies for those students who eventually fail to successfully complete their studies.