The main aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of why students abandon their studies, or perform less well than expected given their high school grades, and to develop predictive models that can help identify those students most at-risk at the time they enter college. This will allow teachers and those responsible for student…

We study a set of programs implemented in Philadelphia high schools that focus on boosting high school graduation, and especially college attendance, using data from the Philadelphia Educational Longitudinal Study (PELS). We examine the effects of these programs on a set of schooling-related outcomes during and after high school. The PELS data-set…

This article shows how the methods of survival analysis (also known as event history analysis) lend themselves to the study of the timing of educational events. Using examples from teacher attrition and student dropout research, survival methods are introduced for building statistical models of the risk of event occurrence over time. (Author/SLD)

Comments on "The Timing of a First Birth and High School Completion" (Dawn M. Upchurch and James McCarthy) (1990). In considering relationships between adolescent childbearing and completion of high school, Upchurch and McCarthy misinterpret socioeconomic data. Their conclusion that young mothers are no less likely to graduate from high school is…