One in three students suffers from at least one common mental disorder highlighting the high prevalence of health issues in higher education. At the same time, every third student drops out of university without achieving their degrees. Nevertheless, connections between health and students' dropout behavior have hardly been investigated. Grounding…

Excessive course dropping is costly to students and institutions. Using longitudinal transcript data, this study investigated course withdrawal patterns among 5900 students at a large, racially/ethnically diverse community college district in Texas. Two-thirds of the students dropped at least one course, and 13.5% of the total course enrollments…

Students from a lower socioeconomic background have a higher risk of dropping out of higher education. The underlying mechanisms of this association between socioeconomic background and higher education dropout are not well understood. Previous research in higher education has followed Tinto's model of academic and social integration to explain…

In 2010, South Korea introduced a new student loan program that was income contingent (ICL). One of the main expected outcomes of the new loan program was to provide credit-constrained students the ability to focus on their college education rather than having to work while enrolled. To this end, this study investigates the effect of ICL on…

Community colleges serve nearly half of all undergraduates, including a disproportionate share of African American and Hispanic students, and are a key point of access to higher education for students who face socioeconomic disadvantages or other obstacles to participation in higher education. Community colleges stand to play a pivotal role in…

This study explores how student employment affects college persistence and how these effects differ by individual likelihood of participating in student employment. I analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 using propensity score matching and stratification-multilevel analysis. This study finds that engaging in intense…

A considerable proportion of students in Germany has graduated from vocational training before entering higher education. With this paper we examined how these students progress through higher education. We argue that successful graduation is the result of a sequence of decisions and decompose the trajectories through higher education to…

Previous studies have documented student-faculty interaction in STEM, but fewer studies have specifically studied negative forms of interaction such as discrimination from faculty. Using a sample of 562 STEM undergraduates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, we use hierarchical generalized linear modeling to investigate various…

In the past two decades, although access to higher education for American students has improved, student persistence in 4-year institutions is far from assured. There have been a number of research studies on student persistence/dropout in higher education, but most have focused on the characteristics and behavior of students as illustrated by the…

While the literature on postsecondary student success identifies important academic and social factors associated with student outcomes, one question that persists concerns the influence of financial aid. We use the National Student Clearinghouse's StudentTracker service to develop a more complete model of student success that accommodates…

In this paper we study the factors that influence both dropout and (4-year) degree completion throughout university by applying the set of discrete-time methods for competing risks in event history analysis, as described in Scott and Kennedy (2005). In the French-speaking Belgian community, participation rates are very high given that higher…

Nationally, a majority of community college students require remedial assistance with mathematics, but comparatively few students who begin the remedial math sequence ultimately complete it and achieve college-level math competency. The academic outcomes of students who begin the sequence but do not complete it are disproportionately unfavorable:…

Current higher education is characterized by a proliferation of distance education programs and by an increasing inclusion of nontraditional students. In this study we investigated whether and to what extent nontraditional students are particularly at risk for attrition (vs. graduating) from distance education programs. We conducted a secondary…

Using national survey data and discrete-time logit modeling, this research seeks to understand whether student aid mediates the relationship between parental income and student dropout behavior. Our analysis confirms that there is a gap in dropout rates for low-income students compared with their upper income peers, and suggests that some types of…

The impact of academic programs--such as developmental mathematics programs--on student retention, has been a controversial topic for administrators, policy makers, and faculty in higher education. Despite deep interest in the effectiveness of these programs in retaining students, scholars have been unable to determine whether such programs have a…