“We’ve got you pegged”: programme choice in the transition to,and passage through,higher education

A 2010 paper published in Higher Education investigated the relationship between South African Grade 12 students’ programme preferences in 2001 for study in higher education, student enrolment in higher education programmes in 2002, and student graduations in 2006, devising what the author dubbed a preference-enrolment-graduation (PEG) model. The current paper, while recognizing the value of that model, points up its design limitations, proposing an alternative methodology for comparing student preferences, enrolments, and graduations that, using centralised Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS) student record data, tracks the 2005 cohort of Grade 12 students along their higher education trajectories for the next 5 years (2006–2010), investigating the consistency of choice between programme preference, enrolment, and graduation.