Our personal and professional lives intersect: the story of how one young man dropped out of a doctoral program in physics to figure out what to do about the continuing problem of dropout in higher education.

The 2013 edition of "Diplomas Count," entitled "Second Chances: Turning Dropouts into Graduates," examines dropout recovery and innovative strategies for returning to the educational fold the 1 million students who leave school without a diploma each year. "Education Week's" journalists investigate interventions that…

Performance and productivity have become central goals in higher education reforms since the 1970s. The implications are more or less straightforward when it comes to teaching and research; academic staff should teach and publish more, while institutions should produce more graduates at a lower cost, and these graduates should quickly find a…

Background: Many "dropout" studies use the concept of risk as a framework for understanding the persistent problem of high school noncompletion among students of color in urban schools. This research, which frames risks as statistical probabilities and largely focuses on static and individual risk factors, does not account for the myriad…

This study examined the contribution of mentor support to the following aspects of high-school dropouts' lives: the personal (self-esteem, and the process of becoming less religious [BLR]), social (societal conditional positive and negative regard) and psychological (well-being and loneliness). The study, conducted among Ultraorthodox Jewish…

The purpose of this study is to unravel the education-migration nexus in the African context, specifically Ethiopia. It examines why young people terminate their education to migrate out of the country. The study applies de Haas' aspiration-capability framework and Turner's macro, meso and micro sociology as its analytical lenses. It offers unique…

The objective of this paper is to study how the registration time (early versus late) and the availability of the self-selection options (online and face-to-face) affect the eLearning outcomes in higher education. The students' performance in terms of the GPA and the DFW (drop, fail, and withdrawal) is compared in two online sections of an…

Objective: To determine the association of social support with alcohol abuse, depression, and health care access among Latino immigrant men in an emerging Latino community (an area with a small yet growing Latino population). Methods: Cross-sectional baseline data of 140 men prior to a participatory male-to-male community health worker…

Given the increasing expectation that students should bear most of the college-cost burden, loans have been the largest form of financial aid since 1982, a shift that has been particularly hard on needy students. Loan-aversion has contributed to the access problem for these students, while facilitating more privileged students' ability to…

Almost seven thousand students drop out of high school every day. Without strong literacy skills, students are less likely to experience academic success and more likely to drop out. This has a negative impact not only on those students, but on the economy. If the dropouts from the Class of 2011 had graduated, the nation's economy would have…

Drop-outs and delays of graduation is currently a huge problem in adult education. The main reason for the drop-outs and delays is usually stated to be the difficulty of combining studies with family and work. This study was based on interviews where students studying in the bachelor's or master's degree programme were interviewed to find out the…

This paper analyzes how changes in school expenditures affect dropout rates based on data from 466 school districts in New York during the 2003/04 to the 2007/08 school years. Past traditional regression approaches show mixed results in part because school expenditures are likely endogenous, so that one cannot disentangle cause and effect. The…

With early school leaving prevention being an agreed European Union headline target of 10% across the EU by 2020, emotional-relational dimensions to education are gaining renewed attention in European education policy. Against this backdrop, prominent criticisms of an emotional well-being agenda in education by Ecclestone and Hayes require further…

Research on school dropout suggests that the decision to drop out of school is not a sudden or immediate one, but rather the result of a long-term process of withdrawal from school. While school engagement and truancy are among the most prominent constructs to be associated as precursors of school dropout, the relationship between these two…

Studies of psychological distress (PD) in university students have shown that they have high prevalence rates. These findings have raised concerns that PD may be leading to poorer student outcomes, such as elevated dropout rates. The aim of this study was to examine the association of PD in undergraduate university students with the competing…