Studies of college attrition typically assume that all attrition is permanent. We use data from the 1990/94 Beginning Postsecondary Survey to distinguish between long-term dropout and short-term stopout behavior in order to test that assumption. We find significant differences between those who stop out and those who drop out in the first year.…

Student retention is an important issue for all university administrators and faculty due to the potential negative impact of student attrition. In this study, retention rates will be studied with data from sophomore students who initially enrolled in the 2002 academic year at Arizona State University, following these students through their junior…

Today's society is global, multicultural, multilingual, and digitally connected. Learning no longer occurs just in the classroom, delivered by teachers. At the same time, research has repeatedly shown that no single strategy or approach will turn around low-performing schools and reengage students. As a result, districts and schools are reaching…

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…

This study empirically explores the comparability of traditional survey-based retention research methodology with an alternative approach that relies on data commonly available in institutional student databases. Drawing on Tinto's [Tinto, V. (1993). "Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition" (2nd Ed.), The University…

We use data from the 1990/1994 Beginning Post-Secondary Survey to determine whether the factors associated with long-term attrition from higher education differ for students who initially enrolled part-time as compared to for students who initially enrolled full-time. Using a two-stage sequential decision model to analyze the initial enrollment…

In recent years, there has been an increasingly pervasive discourse regarding the need for high levels of post-secondary education for life course success in a knowledge economy. Correspondingly, most Western industrialized nations have seen a drastic increase in university enrolment. Although we do know that access to university continues to be…

The phenomenon of student attrition is an increasingly challenging problem confronting American higher education. Unfortunately, there exists virtually no consensus on root causes; and disagreements continue over what intervention strategies might help to reduce the rates with which young collegians abandon their studies and leave campus. Data…

These dropout and migration statistics were compiled during the first year of implementation of the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) dropout tracking and database system. These data were collected, primarily, to determine the number of students leaving the DCPS before graduation who did not re-enroll in another educational institution.…

In the issue-attention cycle identified by political scientists, the imagination and energy of public leaders progress from alarmed discovery of a problem, to euphoric resource mobilization and a search for solutions, to institutionalization of responses. Next come the harsh realities of expensive answers and slow progress, causing a hasty retreat…

College student retention has become the area of research that has done the most to integrate various administrative factors and academic disciplinary concerns in the research agenda of higher education. V. Tintos model has long been cited as the major theory in explaining dropout behavior. As his theory is so intertwined with path analysis,…

This is the third edition of a new generation of reports on dropouts for the school district of Saginaw, Michigan. The dropout rate is specified as the percentage of students who leave school in any one year, adjusting for those who moved in and out of the district, whereas retention rate is defined as the percentage of ninth graders who graduate…

This report presents statistics from the second year (1990-91) of the District of Columbia Public Schools' (DCPS) implementation of procedures to identify and track student dropouts. Other school "leaver" data was also collected. The primary data presented in this report focuses on secondary school dropouts (grades 7-12). However,…

Understanding why students drop out is important in developing effective dropout prevention strategies. Traditional research has focused on high school dropouts; recent interest uses a developmental approach and examines possibilities for earlier intervention. Each section of this report analyzes dropout prevention at the preschool, elementary,…

This preliminary report describes part of NKI-Skolen's planned contribution to a cooperative study on student non-start and early withdrawals in correspondence education, which was created by the Norwegian Association of Correspondence Schools. A project is explained which will examine the organization of the initial phases of a student's…