There is increasing attention on the retention of international students, with many stakeholders desiring to keep international students for long-term economic growth. This study examined the factors affecting international students choosing to stay in Finland 5 years after initial enrollment, with particular focus on the role graduation plays in…

Multiple factors influence a student's success in high school graduation. Individual factors such as disability, racial or ethnic identity, and gender may result in inequity in the school environment, interfering with learning and possibly leading to poorer educational outcomes. This secondary analysis of student educational records (N = 3,782)…

Improving graduation rates is one of the biggest missions in many universities across the country and it is surely the case on the campus of this institution. The work here presents a statistical tool box to use early academic performance as a predictor for graduation with logistic regression and machine learning techniques. The methods described…

The paper studies a unique education reform that decreased the length of secondary-level vocational education from 4 to 3 years, reducing the time spent on general subjects while keeping the time spent on vocational training. We use a difference-in-difference strategy by comparing reformed schools with early adopters before and after the reform.…

Recent research suggests that dual enrollment programs are a useful recruiting tool for colleges and universities as many high school students remain at their dual enrollment institution after high school graduation. Students staying enrolled at their dual enrollment institution for college may be beneficial for institutions, but is it beneficial…

Objective: Dual enrollment has become a significant portion of community college enrollment throughout the country. Some scholars have argued that dual enrollment implementation can be used as a viable policy lever to achieve the certificate and associate degree obtainment outcomes identified in "Reclaiming the American Dream," a…

Close to two million first-year undergraduates enroll in developmental education each year. According to recent national estimates, less than half of students who start in developmental education go on to complete gateway courses and less than one-third eventually earn a degree. However, more research is needed to better assess potential…

Between 2001 and 2005, higher education in Italy went through a considerable process of reform according to the "Bologna Process." This paper evaluates the effects of this process on the academic performance of students. We estimate the difference in graduation probability between students who switched from pre-reform university courses…

This study analyzes the relationship of completion of a college level personal finance course to undergraduate retention and graduation rates. Through the utilization of comparative data, results demonstrated that students who completed the personal finance course had a significantly higher probability of year to year retention and successful…

Decades of research have estimated the effect of entering a community college on bachelor's degree attainment. In this study, we examined the influence of methodological choices, including sample restrictions and identification strategies, on estimated effects from studies published between 1970 and 2017. After systematically reviewing the…

Objective: This study examines how accurately a small set of short-term academic indicators can approximate long-term outcomes of community college students so that decision-makers can take informed actions based on those indicators to evaluate the current progress of large-scale reform efforts on long-term outcomes, which in practice will not be…

In this paper, we estimate the effect of receiving financial aid for a cohort of students who enrolled at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in the year 2007/2008, through a propensity score matching approach. Using administrative data about these students for four years, the impact of the financial aid on several dimensions of academic performance was…

Students with chronic medical conditions often experience barriers to academic progress, including impact of disease and treatment, increased school absence, and altered expectations of teachers and parents. School belonging is an important element of academic success and can be promoted by positive relationships, structure, and support in the…

This study investigated the effect of personal identity and social comparison on college graduation. First-year college students completed an online survey measuring exploration and commitment to personal identity and perceptions of the prototypical student. Those who perceived the typical student as favorable but dissimilar to themselves had the…

The provision of grant aid is important to students' postsecondary opportunities and success. It is well established that grant aid increases the probability of enrollment in postsecondary education. A slate of studies in recent years has extended this research to examine whether grant aid also has an impact on persistence and degree attainment.…