Researchers look to find risks for quitting college in new study
The key to keeping students enrolled in college may be a bit closer to being revealed thanks to a new study ran by researchers at Michigan State University. The study found that certain expected factors, like a death in the family, coming into a lot of money, or getting married or engaged, played less of a role in a student failing to complete school than originally expected.
“Traditionally the problems of employee turnover and college student attrition have been viewed from different lenses,” said Jessica Keeney, a project researcher and doctoral student in psychology at Michigan State University. “But we see a lot of similarities in how employees and students decide to quit. A ‘shocking’ event, such as a clash with a co-worker or roommate, could be the final factor that pushes someone to leave.”
Using a list of 21 "critical events" the researchers surveyed more than 1,100 freshman at 10 colleges and universities across the nation asking them if any of the "shocks" happened to them during their last semester in school. Later on, the students were also asked if they intended to drop out of college. The study identified some risks for a student leaving school including roommate problems, getting an unexpected bad grade, losing financial aid, and being recruited for a job or by another school. The most influential risk for withdrawal from school, according to the College Board-funded study, was depression.
There is intense interest in identifying ways to increase the college completion rate in the United States not only to reach President Barack Obama's goal to become the international leader in college completion, but also to decrease the statistic that more than 40 percent of college students fail to earn a degree within six years of entering school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
"Prior to this work, little was known about what factors in a student’s everyday life prompt them to think about withdrawing from college,” said Tim Pleskac, Michigan State University assistant professor of psychology and lead researcher on the project. “We now have a method to measure what events are ‘shocking’ students and prompting them to think about quitting.”
“From an institutional perspective,” he continued, “we are now better suited to think about what students we should target in terms of counseling or other assistance to help them work through these issues.”
The study's findings are set to be published in the journal "Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes."
