High attrition rates in massive open online courses (MOOCs) have motivated growing interest in the automatic detection of student "stopout". Stopout classifiers can be used to orchestrate an intervention before students quit, and to survey students dynamically about why they ceased participation. In this paper we expand on existing…

The introduction of demand-driven funding following the Bradley Review has seen the progressive removal of constraints on the number of undergraduate places that universities can offer, therefore allowing universities to set their own growth levels. In South Australia, there is little unmet demand for university places. Traditionally, universities…

Back-and-forth enrollment at different institutions--student swirl--and concurrent enrollment at two or more institutions--double-dipping--have become common experiences for students in the United States. However, empirical studies explaining student mobility are rather rare. This study examines how student departures from and returns to a single…

Graduate students across the world in higher education have self-selected themselves into their chosen degree programs, and each student tends to be assigned an advisor, or multiple advisors, to assist them through these programs. Graduate students tend to be self-directed and read most, if not all, of the literature supplied by an institution to…

Existing research demonstrates a strong relationship between the prevalence of irregular enrollment patterns among community college students and their low rates of degree attainment (Adelman 2006; Bahr 2009; Berkner et al. 2000; Goldrick-Rab 2004, 2007; Horn and Nevill 2006). However, very little is known about the features and processes that…

Studies of 1-year retention commonly use a binary outcome (retained after 1 year, yes/no) as the dependent variable. This paper examines the use of alternate specifications of 1-year retention that include information about spring semester stopout behavior. Different types of discrete choice models are first described, Next, the multinomial logit…

The methods and formula developed by the National Center for Education Statistics for the collection of dropout counts and the formula have been topics of some discussion among various states, including Nevada, and especially Arizona. This paper highlights, from a state's perspective, some of the conceptual, methodological, and statistical…

A study analyzed student delays in flight certification at 106 University Aviation Association (UAA) member postsecondary institutions. After a pilot survey of 5 institutions, questionnaires were mailed to the 101 remaining UAA administrators; 80 responses were returned. Correlations of items in the survey were analyzed and significant…

College attrition rates are of substantial concern to policy makers and economists interested in educational attainment and earnings opportunities. This is not surprising since nationwide, almost one-third of all first-time college students fail to return for their sophomore year. There exists a substantial body of literature seeking to model this…

To more accurately reflect student attributes and enrollment patterns of today's freshmen, and to account for the impact of a new state-funded scholarship, this study expands the set of variables typically found in retention studies by putting greater focus on first-year academic performance, concurrent enrollment, financial aid support, and…

Using multi-spell discrete time binary logistic regression, this study examined sequential occurrences of students' departures and returns over the period of six years. The model included time-invariant (gender, ethnicity, parents' educational attainment, family income, timing of matriculation, high school performance, and geographic origin) and…

This study examined the complexities of adjustment to college and its effect on the college student's intent-to-persist in college. The study mailed survey questionnaires (a combination of the "Anticipated Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire" and the "Social Propensity Scale") to a random sample of first-time,…

This study applied newly-developed methods of survival analysis with repeated events to a longitudinal data set in order to illustrate stopout hazards for college students. Survival analysis incorporates cases of students returning to college and not yet returning to college in a single analysis. This study applied a multiple-spell survival…

Almost all studies of college student retention inappropriately combine stopouts with transfer-outs due to a lack of data. The National Student Loan Clearinghouse (NSLC) has created a new database that tracks students across institutions. These data, in combination with institutional databases, now allow researchers to take into account both…

This study examined graduation and attrition patterns of undergraduates who were enrolled in the fall semester but who did not return for the spring semester at a doctoral granting, metropolitan university. A total of 504 of the 1,262 students who enrolled in the fall 1992 semester but who did not return for the spring 1993 semester completed a…