UK students least likely to drop out of uni

Study reveals UK is home to less flakers than anywhere else in Europe

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Students who study in the UK are less likely to drop out of uni than those in the rest of Europe.

This will be you one day

A new study reveals that we’ve got the lowest drop-out rate in Europe – at just 16%.

So it looks like it’s time to get the champers in. We might be stereotyped as lazy layabouts – but now it’s been proven that we’re better than most at sticking it out when it comes to our education.

The study, carried out at Southampton University, looked at unis, colleges and technical training institutions in the UK.

And the glory of UK student life is clearly infectious, with 38% of those who walk away from uni life eventually coming back to try again.

It’s the Norweigan’s who are almost as committed as us. Norway’s stats come close behind ours, with 16.8% of students dropping out and almost 60% returning.

And across the channel in France, an impressive 19.1% of students also abandon their degrees.

But even we can’t compare to the almighty East: the study also looked at Japan and Korea, and found that only 11.4% of Korean students and 6.6% of Japanese students don’t make it to graduation.  Show-offs.

Meanwhile, Italy has astronomical rates of flakers, with a whopping third of students abandoning their studies. And only 8% of the drop-outs ever go back.

Dave Pratt, a recent Leeds University Economics and Philosophy drop-out told The Tab:

“I felt like I had got everything I needed from university. At the end it was just me paying a lot of money to learn things I’d never need to use in the real world.

“I couldn’t answer that question with a valid answer at the time and there were a lot of things I wanted to spend my time doing, so I made the decision to leave.

“Like I was just at uni because it was the ‘done thing’ and I had been told I needed a degree to get employed or do well. I realised that wasn’t true and found the reasons for staying to be minor.

“I was more interested in the practical aspect of learning as opposed to the theoretical benefits, and thought the real world was a better place to learn about the world than a library.

“I’d consider going back to uni if it was clear how it would help me in the real world.”

I’m just so thrilled to be here

But the study also used some complicated mathematical sums to say that trying and failing leaves you worse off than never trying.

Drop-outs find it much harder to get a good job in the UK than people who never even got to uni in first place.

To add insult to injury, this is not the case in France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland and Europe. Here, twice as many drop-outs have the top managerial positions compared to people who never went to even went to uni to begin with.