I read the entire thing, but the article is meager and that's being generous.
You don't provide any of the data you're talking about with these DSD experiences. It's all anecdotal.
The focus group is way too small, it's one shop. The data is worthless in this quantity.
Another gripe I have with it is that you're using the drop out rate with DSD.
You're not dropping out when you're doing DSD. There is no followup after DSD. It's a tryout to see wether you actually like scuba.
Without trying to do the same thing: it would only be valuable to check if you actually did a study as to why exactly these people did a DSD.
If you don't know the motivation for choosing DSD, comparing DSD and certifications is like comparing going to a shooting range once with a 'sports shooting course'.
The motivations and purposes of these courses are completely different. That also makes it more difficult to compare the data or even consider the data valuable in connection to one another.
You also don't link to any data actually supporting that 70 % 'awful' experiences. The word 'awful' should also probably not even be used in a context where you are calling someone up to gather data. Unless you give them a survey where the word awful is literally one of the choices.
To make this somewhat meaningful you would need a waaay bigger focus group, many shops from multiple regions (could still be NA only and be significant) and actually use a system to check the initial motivation before the bad experience and categorise the type of bad experience.
That way you could analyse or atleast have a meaningful way of seeing why these experiences are awful.
Now you just claim they are bad and assume things without actually providing a meaningful data backed answer to why they are bad.
Yeah, what this guy said. One hundred times over.
I'm a scientist. This article was drivel. No data, no citations, nothing to back up that "70% had an 'awful' experience" claim - "Here's a real life story from an urban dive store [that goes to another school across town - you've never been there, but it's real, I swear]." If 70% had an "awful experience" how many had a decent experience and would try it again? Even if it was 10%, if that monthly list was often twice as long as their annual entry level certifications list, and they can only convince 10% of them to do an Open Water class, that's more than doubling their annual certifications.
I'm a fairly new instructor, but since March I have done Try Scuba with 26 different students. A few have continued on to open water diver, many were only doing it because they thought it would be a fun one-time activity; $75 for Try Scuba is a fun date night and way more affordable than $500 plus gear for OWD. Probably a third of my students have been kids who are too young to get certified, but old enough to do TS. I've had a couple of people say they had fun, but it's not their thing. I don't think anyone has ever had an "awful" experience.
You might see a much higher rate of conversions at inland scuba centers than in Caribbean resorts because people on vacation are doing it as something to do and probably far fewer of them ever had any intention of ever doing it again. I went ziplining once in Belize, but I didn't become a lifelong zipliner and I don't think I would be considered a "dropout" of the ziplining industry. It was just the excursion I picked for that stop on my cruise.
The article is not very well written. You link to a report from the Business of Diving Institute, but fail to mention the important fact that YOU ARE THE BUSINESS OF DIVING INSTITUTE! Your second graph (from the BDI!) makes no sense. What are you trying to point out with the 5.3M bar? Potential customers?
So your proposed solutions are to improve the DSD experience or eliminate it. Improvement worldwide is going to be very difficult unless you can control what every dive operator everywhere is doing. They all have to report to a training agency and they all have to adhere to standards. If they aren't doing that, they should be forced to shut down. Nobody allows DSD to occur at 110 feet. That's beyond the training of a newly certified OWD! You propose to tighten up the ratios to 2:1. Dive training is an absurdly low-margin business as it is and cutting out half the class means cutting out half the profits. Your second suggestion is flat out ridiculous. How is SNUBA a better experience than SCUBA? It's the same regulator that can free flow (albeit not at 110 feet), it's the same mask that can flood. If students want to try SCUBA it makes no sense if the resort says "No, we have something much better. It's not SCUBA, it's SNUBA and you're going to like it so much that you're going to want to try SCUBA after you do it!"
The quote about insanity is from a fictional character in a fiction novel, not Albert Einstein.
