Women's Perspectives on Retention in Higher Education in Jordan: Commute and Choice

Abstract

Jordan is viewed as a country of social, political, and economic and advancement. It currently leads the region in literacy rates and is well on its way to achieving gender equity. However, some reports claim that Jordan maintains the widest gender gap in higher education completion in the region while others report that the percentage of females is higher than males. There is a body of literature on college student retention but no such work has taken place in the Middle East, and more specifically in Jordan, on the experiences of women in higher education and retention. This study explores the experiences of 18 women that, at the time of the data collection (2008–2009), were in their final year or semester of higher education and preparing to graduate (average age 22.3 years old) and 10 women, that were at one point formally enrolled but at the time of the study had departed from completing higher education (average age 22.8 years old). These women represented 13 different universities (7 public and 6 private) throughout Jordan. Interviews were conducted with each participant. In addition to interviews, visits with the women were conducted on the university campus and official university and ministry education records were collected to examine enrollment, graduation, and retention rates. These varied qualitative methods allowed for a holistic exploration of the patterns in the persistence of women in higher education. This study found that the main retention theories formed in the United States are not completely adequate in helping explain the situation of women in Jordan and this study alters and extends them, placing more weight on characteristics at the individual-level, rather than on the institutional-level, with more attention paid to the role of the commute and the inflexibility of the higher education admissions process, in order to make them more applicable to the context of women in Jordan.