Shadow education is advancing towards higher professional education
Commercial study coaches support students more intensively, sometimes all day long. "For minima, purchasing this type of guidance is a problem."
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'Study coaching from group 4 up to and including master', is what adorns the facade of Maltha's Utrecht office. Students can go there throughout their educational career for tutoring, homework guidance or help with learning difficulties. And students can call in a personal study coach or thesis help for 55 euros per hour. “We have had that offer for 36 years,” says owner Willem Maltha. “Pupils in secondary education don't learn to plan or how to sort information. As a result, they get completely lost in higher education. That is not new, it has always been a problem. ”
According to the researchers, one in eight secondary school students is following some form of shadow education.
Maltha was one of the first student counseling institutions in the Netherlands, says the founder. “I got to know the concept of study coaching in the US. The word didn't even exist in the Netherlands when I started it ”, says the pioneer. Study guidance is now available boom business. There are 630 companies that provide tutoring, homework assistance and exam training, according to research conducted last year by Oberon and SEO economic research on behalf of the Ministry of Education. Their turnover mainly comes from secondary education. According to the researchers, one in eight secondary school students is following some form of shadow education. Their mostly highly educated parents spend an estimated 185 to 286 million euros per year on this. Homework assistance costs them an average of 1000 euros per year, tutoring 350 euros and exam training 275 euros.
That there is money to be made from student counseling is also evident from the interest of investors. Studiekring, one of the largest players in the industry, has been in the hands of a Belgian investment company since 2011. The company offers homework and study coaching at more than a hundred locations. Half of those branches are located in a school. But the growth is gone. “Things have been shuffled in secondary education,” says Greke Heida, who maintains relations with schools at Studiekring. "Schools that want to offer homework support now have a partner."
Growth market
Higher education appears to be the new growth market. In October it was announced that a Dutch investment company is investing a million euros in the young Amsterdam-based firm Pallas Athena, which offers tutoring and exam training for university students throughout the country and soon also in Germany. The bureau works with senior students who brush up on groups of up to ten students in traditional stumbling blocks such as statistics and accounting. The company therefore mainly competes with teachers who offer tutoring via Marktplaats.
The student counseling offer is also growing rapidly. Utrecht students can now not only contact Maltha, but also providers such as Thesis Master, Graduation Supervisor, Study Masters, Jouw Scriptiecoach, TopScriptie or the Tutoring Academy. They are usually intermediaries who put students in contact with additional teachers who are familiar with a specific field and who offer individual guidance for 50 to 85 euros per hour. But also institutes with their basis in secondary education focus on the higher education market.
“Over the past two years, more and more students have come to us who have problems with study planning or get stuck writing their thesis,” says Puck Loermans of Institute HIP, which has fifteen branches in the province of Utrecht and Het Gooi. "We will certainly answer that question."
Because study coaching has become fairly normal in secondary education, the threshold for students has become lower, Loermans thinks. "You no longer have to be ashamed of it if you don't succeed with your study or thesis."
There are simply students who need more structure and involvement
For 45 euros per hour, Institute HIP provides a teacher who coaches students on cross-curricular skills such as planning, exam preparation or structuring and writing a thesis. The Utrecht branch, where Loermans is in charge, is currently supervising thirty secondary school students and seven students: six higher vocational education students and one MBO student. Some students need ten coaching sessions. “They just need a helping hand,” says Loermans. “But we also have a student who we've been guiding for a whole year now.
Independent
Joris Jansen is a part-time teacher at Fontys Hogeschool and started Jansen & Co Thesis Supervision four years ago. He works with five permanent supervisors who, like himself, have experience as a teacher in higher education. Together they have now helped 350 students with their graduation research, three quarters of which come from higher professional education. HBO students are not always well prepared during their studies to do research and write a thesis, he believes. “We work a lot in groups. That is not for nothing, because it teaches students to work together. But at the end of their studies they suddenly have to write a thesis independently. Not every student is designed to spend months on research alone. ”
Jansen & Co recently started to have study workplaces where students spend a whole day working on their thesis while Jansen or one of his colleagues is nearby to answer questions. "We start the day together with some kind of work meeting and evaluate progress at the end of the day."
Focus on Graduation, the company of Fieke Mangelaars and Theo Mos, has had an office space with study workplaces since its start in 2017, where students work on their thesis under supervision. “We provide a structured, orderly study environment where they can focus on working on a final thesis,” Mangelaars explains. “Students can make progress here”, Theo Mos adds. “I can tell them a lot about a research design or the structure of a thesis in a 1-on-1 conversation, but after that they have to do it themselves. This is possible here, while we are available for questions. ”
Just like Jansen & Co, Focus on Graduation supervises many higher professional education students. “HBO students don't learn how to write a thesis. For example, they don't know how to work with APA citation ”, says Mos. “How to do that can be found on the internet, there are plenty of manuals and tutorials. Many students find out for themselves, but others would like a personal explanation. ”
Burn down
HBO students get stuck because they receive conflicting feedback. “They receive instructions from their supervisor, follow them up properly and then the examiner rejects the thesis anyway,” says Joris Jansen. And the graduation circles that more and more universities of applied sciences work with often only confuse students, says Theo Mos. “It is a kind of group supervision, in which students give each other feedback on their research question and the structure of the thesis. But of course you won't get anywhere with feedback from a fellow student who is struggling with his thesis. ”
HBO students do not learn how to write a thesis
“The feedback from teachers could be a bit more constructive,” says Fieke Mangelaars. "In terms of content, I often agree with the comments, but supervisors sometimes completely burn off a thesis."
This is not to say that universities of applied sciences are failing en masse. Although the fourteen to sixteen hours per student that HBO lecturers receive for thesis supervision is tight, Mos thinks. But if universities of applied sciences would put twice as many hours into supervision, the problem would not be solved, says Jansen. "The cause is that universities of applied sciences do not offer customization."
“There are simply students who need more structure and involvement than a university of applied sciences can offer”, Mangelaars and Mos also add: “There is not enough capacity at a university of applied sciences to solve individual problems and sometimes not enough expertise.”
Uniform sausage
A study workplace costs 60 euros per day at Focus on Graduation, the same as an hour of study coaching. Students sometimes need a few conversations, but for students who need a study workplace for a longer period of time, the costs run up to 1000 or 2000 euros. “It's cheaper than getting a driver's license,” says Theo Mos. “And less than an extra year of tuition fees”, Mangelaars adds. "But for minimums, purchasing this type of guidance is of course a problem and that is painful."
We are diving into the gap in the market that universities of applied sciences are dropping
“It is not always children with parents who earn two or three times the average who come to us,” says Willem Maltha. “There are also parents who do not have that much money at all, but think it is important that their child gets a diploma. So it's a matter of priorities. ” But they are usually students with highly educated parents, he admits. This ensures that the dichotomy in society increases. But that is not due to shadow education, he thinks. “Higher education has become a mass product in which everyone receives standard treatment. Students are treated like uniformity. Those who can't get into that rat race, and who can afford it, come to us. Shadow education is therefore not the problem, we try to offer a solution for the dropouts produced by higher professional education itself. ”
“We are diving into the gap in the market that is created because universities of applied sciences do not offer the guidance they need,” says Puck Loermans of Institute HIP. “If there is more demand, more companies will meet that demand. It's that simple." That demand will only increase in the coming years, she predicts. “It has become so important to have a diploma. You are nothing without a bachelor's degree. ”
