Barriers to and enablers for the success of postgraduate students in social work

Abstract

All over the world, higher education institutions (HEIs) are concerned about low enrollment, delayed completion rates, non-completion, and the subsequent smaller number of graduates of Master’s and doctoral programmes. This is also true for the postgraduate students in Social Work at a South African public university, with statistics showing a high dropout rate and extended completion times. The poor throughput rate of the postgraduate programme in Social Work motivated the exploration of barriers to and enablers for student success in this programme. This was done through a qualitative descriptive design, using an online questionnaire with open-ended reflective questions. The collected data was uploaded to Atlas.ti 9 and analyzed by means of inductive thematic analysis. The findings of this study indicated barriers pertaining to supervision, personal challenges, and the distance-learning delivery mode of academic programmes. External factors and enablers that impacted the success of postgraduate students were also identified.