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This 1985 paper by John Bean and Barbara Metzner creates a model for attrition rates of nontraditional undergraduates through a literature review of over 70 papers covering traditional 4-year universities, commuter 4-year universities, and 2-year colleges. Their model has six major variables, most of which are made up of an index of factors. These variables are background and defining variables, academic variables, academic outcomes, environmental variables, psychological results, and intent to leave. Bean and Metzner do not test their model, nor propose the significance of each factor. This is problematic, especially considering some of their factors, such as academic advising, a factor in academic variables, are showed as positively correlated to persistence in some studies, negatively correlated in others, and of no effect in others. Despite these problems with the model, I found this paper to be a very useful literature review.
The paper defines nontraditional students somewhat ambiguously: being older than 24, or living off campus and commuting, or studying part time; and not relying on the social structure of the institution and concerning themselves primarily with academic issues at the institution. In other words, nontraditional students tend to be cemented in their lives already and have strong existing social circles outside of school, and they are usually pursuing education for better career prospects. They tend to have more outside obligations, such as family and work, which means they have lower attrition rates despite often having higher gpas. Other notable findings are that, compared to traditional students, they have lower high school gpas, less social connections on campus, transfer to other schools less, and were more stressed.
The main problem with this paper is that all of the studies reviewed looked at attrition rates rather than graduation, and many only examined students for a year or less, so it may be missing important insights, especially after freshman year when many of these studies end. It is also unclear whether many of these studies could determine between students who stopped attending an institution because they were only interested in a class or two for personal enjoyment or occupational incentives, transferred to different schools, or dropped out of higher education all together, an important distinction. Still, this paper clearly shows where we know traditional and nontraditional students differ, and where more research needs to be done.
I would like you to reconsider what you wrote in the last paragraph. But first a question about definition. What does attrition rate mean? Does it refer to dropping a course, our dropping out of school altogether? Either way, it is clearly inversely related to graduate rate. So I wouldn't consider it a problem, the way you said, but only that there is some further work to be done to get the full implication for graduation rates.
ReplyDeleteAttrition rate is percent who drop out of school all together. The reason it is problematic, is that researchers usually only measure attrition rate for the first year or two, assuming most who stayed on will graduate. But this is not always a reasonable assumption, and can differ from school to school. It can also be a problem, in that it sometimes measures transferring out of a school and dropping out of the system entirely as the same, but they are not. This is especially important with community colleges, if a student transfers to a 4-year college, this is usually seen as a "success" for the student, but a "failure" for the institution if it hurts attrition rate.
DeleteProblematic is not the right word here, if I understand what you are saying. You would like to measure drop outs only and not count transfers. Attrition counts both.
DeleteNow there is a separate issue of measuring institution performance and if (low) attrition rates mean (high) institution performance. In other words, if it is a good thing for the institution to retain the students till they graduate. You might have some discussion just of that issue.