Abstract
Student attrition is a significant problem and a huge challenge from an institutional point of view. Although completion rates in Poland are lower than in most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, the problem has not been studied thoroughly. In order to shed light on that problem the aim of this paper is to present the results of a mixed methods study on dropout behaviour at the University of Warsaw, Poland’s largest higher education institution, combining administrative data analysis, survey research and individual in-depth interviews. The main results are: 1) students drop out mainly during the first year of studies, 2) there are three main types of dropouts – planned dropout, academic failure and those who are disappointed with their studies 3) one of the reasons for this lies in the process of choosing the study programme. Improving this decision process by providing more information and support to candidates should help reduce dropout rates.
Highlights
Despite the success stories of some higher education dropouts such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg prevalent in public debate, student attrition is still a problem for many reasons
It is worth noting that those numbers may be underestimated: students have no incentive to report their intention to leave before the end of the academic term
This paper summarises the research on student attrition at the University of Warsaw which combined population-wide administrative data, a series of qualitative interviews, and a survey conducted between July and September 2015
Summary
Despite the success stories of some higher education dropouts such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg prevalent in public debate, student attrition is still a problem for many reasons. Reducing attrition is one of the key strategies for achieving higher educational attainment in the European Union (Vossensteyn et al 2015). The research on student attrition has a decades-long history in the US. Researchers have investigated the role of various characteristics of students in student retention and have developed numerous theoretical frameworks for the studies of mechanisms leading to student attrition (Braxton and Hirschy 2005; Braxton and Lee 2005; Kuh et al 2006; Ulriksen et al 2010). Various aspects of student persistence remain a current topic in the literature (e.g. Flores et al 2017; Holden 2016; Trautwein and Bosse 2017)
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