Student loan debt is at record levels in the United States. The negative psychological and financial effects for borrowers are well-documented. This article turns to the individual-level political effects of student loan debt. Rooted in the policy feedback literature, we examine whether the rise in student loan debt is associated with negative…

Success for 4-year universities is often measured by graduation and retention rates; however, gaps exist in understanding nonreturning students at private institutions. Recent research is helping to build the lexicon of drop-outs, stop-outs, opt-outs, and transfer-outs to inform strategic retention initiatives. Using an action research method, we…

Heightened attention to the importance of equitable educational practices in today's schools reveals a growing number of emergent bilingual students who have not received consistent formal education and may be struggling with overall literacy. Labeled as Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE), these learners require novel educational…

Objective: While much research has been conducted on retention, attrition, and college completion among those who voluntarily withdraw from college, few studies have focused on involuntary withdrawal in the form of academic dismissal. Even less scholarship has examined the subsequent restoration of academic momentum for returning students.…

This study investigates occupational changes in the German vocational education and training system among "stopouts," i.e., individuals who terminate their training prematurely and switch to another occupation. We examine whether occupational changes are related to the fulfillment of career aspirations and changes in key occupational…

Supporting students returning to school after a mental health crisis often involves more training than many school staff members receive. With the increase in youth mental health diagnoses, there has also been an increase in the number of youth requiring psychiatric emergency department visits and hospitalizations. As such, this study employed a…

This study leverages a policy change in the missionary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that exogenously influenced the likelihood that a woman took gap time during college to understand how gap time influences women's subsequent choice of major and academic outcomes. If structured gap time shapes educational outcomes,…

Purpose: The purpose of this integrative literature review was three-fold: to explore the phenomenon of women's career interruptions as revealed by publications in the past two decades, to propose a new career decision tree model (CDTM) and to outline an agenda for future research. Design/methodology/approach: The authors adopted the integrative…

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…

Objectives: Responding to Tinto's call for studies of retention that center on "the students' view of their experience" (p. 11), this research project reports findings from telephone interviews of 131 students who stopped out at our home institution, a large open admissions community college in the northeast. Our objective was to find…

The Kalamazoo Promise (KPromise) is amongst the most well-known and generous tuition-free policies. This study advances the understanding of Promise student performance and persistence. We used a weighted-least square means and variance adjusted (WLSMV) SEM approach and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) to deal with missing data. The main model suggested…

This study examines the determinants influencing students' decisions to drop out or stop out (i.e., withdraw temporarily) from colleges in South Korea. Using Korean Education and Employment Panel II survey data (2016-2019), the determinants of students' college discontinuance of 8,485 students were analyzed and categorized as personal, college…

Retaining people no longer credited toward college completion--a group known in academic parlance as "stop outs"--is a core concern among administrators seeking to remove barriers to education. Preventing stop outs from becoming stay outs means re-enrolling students beset by debt, or targeting vulnerable demos close to graduation.…

In Canada, there are few long-term developmental education studies of adult basic education (ABE) students. This lack of studies impedes the understanding of ABE students' complex motivations, their diverse challenges, and their exceptional achievements. This 5-year cohort longitudinal panel study used interview data augmented by quantitative…

The study was set to investigate the influence of regulatory frameworks for higher education on the decrease of student enrollment in 6 selected private tertiary institutions in Rwanda. This study adopted the quantitative research design. The study involved a sample of 370 students selected from the 6 private universities. The study used…