Nearly 70,000 Hungarian students are on the brink of dropping out
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The Hungarian Educational Authority has published the data of the second school year of 2017/2018 concerning the rates of students who are likely to drop out of school. The situation is nothing near satisfactory.
The concept of a student endangered by dropping out appeared in January 2015, in the amendment of the law of public education. According to the definition, a student is in danger of dropping out if their average in a given school year is 3 or below, or, if their average compared to their results in the last year are decreased by over 1.1 grades.
The total number of students is 746,258 in the examined classes – between 5th and 12th grade – and 66,121 students are in the danger of dropping out of school. This means that almost 9% of the students are concerned. The situation in the elementary school is the worst; 41,682 pupils are likely to drop out before finishing elementary education – as 24.hu processed the data of the Hungarian Educational Authority.
From the chart, it is clear that the distribution of the problem is very uneven concerning the counties. It is the lowest Vas county for example, ‘only’ 1,341 students, but in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county it is the second highest number, 7,397 students are endangered by dropping out.
If we compare the number of students and the number of those who are endangered by dropping-out, then we can see, that while in Csongrád county, less than 6% while in Nógrád county, more than 16% of students are concerned by dropping out. If the different school types are concerned, elementary for example, then it is evident that in the region of Northern Hungary, every fifth pupil is about to drop out of school.
There is a catch. One of the goals of the European Union is to improve the rates of employment by 2020. This intention is greatly connected to the educational qualifications of people. Therefore, one of the strategies of the Europe 2020 plan is to confine the ratio of those with low educational qualification. The programme’s aim is to decrease the percentage of those 18-24-year olds, who leave the education system without at least an intermediate or vocational qualification, to under 10% in Europe.