Many community colleges do not have a formal process in place to offer or support a structured gap year option for students who recently graduated from high school, thereby denying those students an educational option that has been recognized as beneficial to many learners. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore factors that…

As of 2023, 43.6 million borrowers owe more than $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. However, there is another, often overlooked, institutional debt that students may owe their former institutions after stopping out. It is estimated that 6.6 million students owe $15 billion in unpaid balances to their institutions. This institutional debt stems…

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…

This study examined the lived experiences of premedical advisors employed in four-year institutions of higher education in the northeastern U.S. advising premedical students about the gap year options between undergraduate education and medical school. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews of 17 premedical advisors and analyzed…

This study sought to respond to the increased number of mature students in social work education and the understudied topic of their experiences. The research deployed semi- structured interviews and thematic analysis to explore the benefits, challenges, and needs of mature students (N = 19) over the age of 30 in a Canadian Bachelor of Social Work…

There are at least 39 million Americans who have attended college but needed to stop out before earning a degree. The "Degree Reclamation Playbook" supports practitioners seeking to reengage this population, capture the momentum of existing credits, and bring students across the degree finish line. Drawing on more than a decade of work,…

This study reports the views of second year medical students from 6 Universities on the value or not of deferring entry to medical school in order to take a "Gap Year" obtained from an anonymous questionnaire. Data were analysed using Fisher's exact test to produce a two tailed P value, with significance defined as p <0.05. A total of…

Transitions in an era of globalisation and universal change impact on postgraduate training of students at higher education institutions. This study aimed to determine completion rates for postgraduate programmes in Education at one higher education institution, to identify the students' needs and to investigate their experiences of postgraduate…

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…

A study was conducted at St. Louis (Missouri) Community College (SLCC) to assess the extent to which data on nonreturning students represent retention problems, the achievement of non-degree goals, or the process of temporarily stopping out. Study findings, based on a 27% response to a summer 1986 survey of 1,706 fall 1985 students who did not…

In spring 1987, a study was conducted at Monroe Community College (MCC) to determine the factors which influence attrition and retention, with particular focus on the reasons why students who have not graduated fail to return for succeeding semesters. Questionnaires were mailed to 452 former students, requesting information on students' rankings…

A study was conducted at a medium-sized California community college to identify the characteristics of students who had previously dropped out of college and then returned to the community college and the influences on their decision to re-enroll for college credit. Surveys were mailed to 396 stopouts, asking them to rate the significance of…

A research project investigated 2,313 persons who attended Del Mar College (Texas) during fall 1990 but did not enroll for spring 1991. Four sets of data were collected: (1) limited demographic information on the total student body; (2) demographic information drawn from school records to describe all nonreturnees; (3) demographic information…

The study reported concentrated on school leavers in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) who returned (dropbacks) to Job Corps Programs over an 8-year period. Interviews with 100 dropbacks explored who left school, why they left school, what caused them to come back, and the kinds of interventions that might succeed with other students. Part 1 provides a…

In February 1994, a study was conducted at Macomb Community College (MCC), in Warren, Michigan, to determine the reasons that students failed to return to MCC. A computer-generated random sample of 1,585 names was drawn from a population of more than 13,000 students identified as non-returning students (NRS's), i.e., who had not enrolled in any…