This study's purpose is to examine whether resilience, conceptualized by Connor and Davidson (2003) as one's capacity to persevere and rebound under adversity, was a potential mitigating and/or moderating factor in the dynamic between both psychological distress and academic burnout, and student attrition. We concurrently distributed a survey…

Given a myriad of recent contemporary challenges graduate students are facing as well as long-standing issues with student attrition, there is a pressing need to reexamine models of doctoral student progress. While existing research commonly examines departure or failure to meet milestones as the outcome of interest, by the time students leave…

Community colleges provide broad access to a college degree due to their less expensive tuition, greater course time offerings, and more open admission policies compared to four-year universities as reported (Juszkiewicz, 2015). These institutions have great potential to diversify who chooses STEM, such as engineering. Such diverse representation…

Placing students on academic probation is a pervasive practice at colleges and universities, but the lasting impact--and arguably even the purpose--of academic probation is unclear. The present study explored the influence of academic probation on four-year graduation using regression discontinuity analyses with a dataset of 9,777 undergraduates.…

Roughly half of 4-year students who begin as STEM majors either change to non-STEM majors or drop out of college altogether. STEM attrition is especially disconcerting for underserved students, such as people of color or individuals from low-income families, who are significantly less likely to persist in or graduate from a STEM degree program…

As the need for engineers continues to increase, a growing focus has been placed on recruiting students into the field of engineering and retaining the students who select engineering as their field of study. As a result of this concentration on student retention, numerous studies have been conducted to identify, understand, and confirm…

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…

We examine the extent to which readily available data at a large public university can be used to a priori identify at-risk students who may benefit from targeted retention efforts. Although it is possible to identify such students, there remains an inevitable tradeoff in any resource allocation between not treating the students who are likely to…

Each year, a sizeable percentage of community college students enroll in remedial coursework to address skill deficiencies in math, writing, and/or reading. Unfortunately, the majority of these students do not attain college-level competency in the subjects in which they require remedial assistance. Moreover, students whose point of entry into the…

This study empirically explores the comparability of traditional survey-based retention research methodology with an alternative approach that relies on data commonly available in institutional student databases. Drawing on Tinto's [Tinto, V. (1993). "Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition" (2nd Ed.), The University…

We use data from the 1990/1994 Beginning Post-Secondary Survey to determine whether the factors associated with long-term attrition from higher education differ for students who initially enrolled part-time as compared to for students who initially enrolled full-time. Using a two-stage sequential decision model to analyze the initial enrollment…

Results include: (1) the most able, most autonomous group included those who withdrew; (2) the most authoritarian, those who became seniors; (3) the most nonconforming, those who "continued" without becoming seniors, and (4) the highest ability to think abstractly, scientifically and to solve problems, the academic dismissals who gained…

A study that investigated the effect on return rates of personalizing the cover letter and including precoded personal information on a mail questionnaire is discussed. A survey of 196 students dropping out of courses offered by a distance education university provided the opportunity to conduct the study reported. (Author/MLW)

The influence of student problems, which are often cited by students as reasons for withdrawal, is compared with the influence of constructs derived from Tinto's student attrition model. The findings suggest that data from post-hoc attrition studies should be used cautiously. (Author/MLW)

A study of attrition after the first year of college was conducted at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. A path-analytic model of nine factors affecting student persistence was tested using LISREL. The results indicate that social integration is an important factor in college persistence. (Author/MLW)