# What causes the high dropout rates in college and graduate school

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-causes-the-high-dropout-rates-in-college-and-graduate-school/278854>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [December 9, 2004, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-causes-the-high-dropout-rates-in-college-and-graduate-school/278854 "2004-12-09T01:33:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\
**Post date:** [December 14, 2004, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-causes-the-high-dropout-rates-in-college-and-graduate-school/278854/61 "2004-12-14T01:21:41Z")

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FY teacher here just to chime in with those saying that many of them simply aren’t up to the challenge. Which is not to say they never will be. I get some students who are not up to par academically, but far more often it’s simply maturity issues: they don’t read they syllabus, don’t stay on top of the schedule, don’t do the reading. They are not self-motivated, and they don’t know how to deal with it when they find out that nobody in college is going to provide motivation or nag them or whatever.

In fact, I have counseled a number of students to drop out; go join the circus for a couple of years, figure out who you are and what you want, and then come back to school.

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**Author:** ![jshore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b5e925/32.png) [@jshore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jshore)\
**Post date:** [December 14, 2004, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-causes-the-high-dropout-rates-in-college-and-graduate-school/278854/62 "2004-12-14T02:22:50Z")

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> [@Tamerlane](#):
>
> Hey, no kidding - so did my dad :). He originally was supposed to be in Robert Richardson’s lab ( I think that’s the one - the guy who recently won the nobel ), but ended up down the hall with some new guy who needed grad students ( though he did end up doing his doctoral dissertation on some aspect of superfluidity of liquid helium, though ).
> 
> Err…that’s all - pretty much a pure hijack/twinkie post ;).

Cool. I don’t remember if I knew any Richardson students per se, although I definitely knew ones who were in that low-temperature group of ~3 or 4 professors. I was a theorist, so I wasn’t down there in the basement. At any rate, I imagine that your father was there before my time (being that I was there '86-'92).

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