Factors impacting postgraduate throughput rates at a South African university of technology

Abstract

Throughput rates, student retention, and dropout rates of postgraduate students remain a critical concern facing higher education institutions around the globe. Higher education institutions continuously strive to find ways in which the various stakeholders can make important decisions to ensure acceleration of throughput rates amongst postgraduate students at these institutions, particularly because the economic crisis relies highly on learned and skillful personnel to stir nations towards developmental goals. Industries requiring skilled personnel are often disappointed by the absence of people able to come to task and this results in a poorer industry when compromises are made to fulfill positions. This study highlighted the most common factors that affect the throughput rates of postgraduate students globally, as well as within South African higher education institutions. This study, however, aimed to investigate the factors that impact throughput rates of postgraduate students at one of the Universities of Technology in South Africa. To achieve the results, a structured questionnaire was administered to Masters's students that have registered at the university since 2012. This research used a mixed-methods approach which includes both qualitative and quantitative research and used a structured questionnaire to collect data. The findings of this study have highlighted that work commitment, supervisor relationship, lack of time management, and the fact that research is a grey area as factors that affected throughput rate of postgraduate students at the University of Technology. Based on the findings and conclusions of the study, it is recommended that more support should be provided to those students that are struggling with work commitments, relationships with supervisors should be encouraged and enhanced, use of planners should be encouraged by breaking down the research into milestones and enforcing timeframes with major consequences to tackle time management and for those that are struggling with the research part of their studies, more exposure of research at the undergraduate level is required.