A recent increased focus is being placed on college completion agendas, yet there is limited research on senior attrition. Examining why students leave school when they are so close to being done and what motivated them to return when they did, this exploratory case study analyzes several data sets at one public university where a degree…

This study concerns students in an internationally accredited undergraduate mechanical engineering program who due to consistent poor grades are academically dismissed and, by existing policy, required to take a 1-year leave of absence. The purpose was to determine whether the policy could be improved to offer more proactive solutions to address…

This exploratory, descriptive study examined trends associated with Kalamazoo Promise (KPromise) student stop out, reenrollment, and persistence to a credential upon reenrollment. For the 2006-2017 cohorts, 78% were retained from first to second year. Inferential models suggested that first-year stop out was mainly correlated to students' high…

This qualitative study explored the external and internal reasons involved in students' decisions to return to college after an extended absence. Specifically, it sought to explore the role of students' concepts of who they might be (or want to avoid becoming) in the college and career domains of their lives, their possible selves. Analysis of…

Utilizing data from the national administration of a Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) baseline and follow-up survey of the first-year experience during the 2002-2003 academic year, this study explores the relationship between three curricular interventions--first-year seminars, service-learning, and learning communities--and the…

We conducted an archival study of at-risk students who had "stopped out" of college for many reasons (academic dismissal, financial problems, personal problems, etc.) and who later were accepted to return to school. Approximately 27% of the accepted students chose not to return. Those who returned had higher grade point averages, had completed…