CCL Home > Research Activities > Funded Research
Executive Summary (PDF 41 KB)
Full Report (PDF 313 KB)
High attrition rates embody one of the most studied, most persistent, and most intractable problems facing post-secondary education. Despite well-intentioned institutional efforts to address this complex issue, North American post-secondary attrition rates have persisted at approximately 30%–40% over the past 30 years.
Despite the wide disparity of studies, findings, and interpretations in this field, some consensus has formed around at least four factors that consistently appear to be strongly related to post-secondary attrition, namely: date of admission, program choice, academic preparedness, and student engagement. The research literature for this study derives primarily from studies of university-level institutions, and that a significant gap exists with respect to attrition studies within the context of community colleges. Furthermore, there has been much less attention to attrition in a purely Canadian context compared to the plethora of American studies in this field. This study, therefore, proposed to address these research gaps by attempting to identify the key factors affecting attrition specifically in the context of a Canadian community college.
Of the 2,408 Non-active students who were no longer enrolled after one year, quantitative analyses indicated statistically significant relationships with all five independent variables. However, subsequent tests of practical significance indicated that less than 1% of the variance in enrollment status between Active and Non-Active students could be explained by gender, date of admission, or program choice. Particularly with respect to admission dates and program choice, while the relative rates of attrition were higher among those Non-active students who had enrolled later than the first available month of admission (May) or who had received less than their first or second preferred choice of program, in practical terms, these groups represented small segments (22% and 19% respectively) of the overall number of Non-active students. Therefore, while gender, date of admission, and program choice were found to be statistically significant factors with respect to individual student decisions to withdraw, from the institutional perspective these variables were not strong determinants of attrition, since the vast majority of students who were Non-active after one year had, in fact, enrolled early (78%) or had received their first or second preferred choice of program (81%).
On the other hand, academic unpreparedness was found to explain 15% of the variance in enrollment status, while lack of student engagement explained 37% of the variance in enrollment status, reflecting the strong affect of these two variables on the majority of students who were Non-active after one year. For example, students who successfully completed academic upgrading programs had significantly lower attrition rates (31%) than the fall 2007 student cohort as a whole (37.3%), and dramatically lower rates than students who had attempted but failed to complete an academic upgrading program (73% attrition), suggesting both a strong statistical and a strong practical relationship between academic unpreparedness and withdrawal from college. Similarly, a strong correlation (r = 0.611, p < 0.001) was found between the scores on a Student Engagement Survey (conducted during the fall 2007 term) and subsequent enrollment status after one year, again suggesting both a strong statistical and a strong practical relationship between low student engagement and withdrawal from college.
Based on the findings in this study, therefore, stakeholders who seek to address the obstinate problem of attrition at Canadian colleges might consider focusing their retention strategies and targeted interventions on the factors that were found to affect most directly the majority of students who were Non-active after one year, namely, academic unpreparedness and low levels of student engagement with the institution.