ABSTRACT
This chapter draws together those which appear to have a bearing on the nature of the higher education experience of students. It begins with an examination of the issue of generalisability in the Introduction. The first reported on what might clearly be taken as a general situation faced by the vast majority of students, and experienced within every university – that of the arrival in a strange place and a new institution of a large number of first year students. Initiation and integration, and the problems which beset students in making sense of this new world, are universal. The consequence of these factors operating together is to provide a situation which fits neatly into the typology offered by Entwistle and Wilson (1977) of syllabus-bound and syllabus-free students. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of why this might be so, and why more traditional approaches to research in higher education have failed to highlight this major problem.
