In the clamor for increasing graduation and persistence rates, are we ignoring the student at risk factors and student characteristics?
February 22nd, 2012In the early days of online education, a commonly discussed phenomenon was the low completion rates of students. Some chose to explain the departure of students using characteristics such as lack of social integration and academic integration for students matriculating in online programs as identified by Vincent Tinto and others. As technologies utilized in the classroom improved and subsequently, online teaching techniques, student persistence improved as well, but not close to the levels sustained by some of the best face-to-face programs.
In research that I conducted initially for my doctoral dissertation and then later in a paper with my colleagues Phil Ice and Angela Gibson, I identified several factors as significant variables leading to student disenrollment from an online program. These variables include no transfer credit received, student’s last grade of F, student’s last grade of W, and low number of courses completed by the student in a 12-month period.
Over the past year and a half, my colleagues and I have continued to examine the student disenrollment patterns at the American Public University System (APUS) and have discussed those patterns with colleagues at a number of other institutions offering online programs. More and more, I have come to believe that the persistence of students who complete three or more undergraduate courses at APUS and the tendency of students who complete fewer than three courses at APUS to eventually disenroll are much more correlated to adult student behaviors previously identified by researchers using data from traditional institutions.
During the past decade, a major increase in enrollments has occurred with the number of adults attending online programs versus face-to-face programs. The reasons are obvious: working adults are able to attend online programs from any location at any time. Those with jobs that frequently take them out of town no longer have to juggle schedules to meet the requirement of taking a face-to-face class, but can log in from another city or country; the only requirement is a computer and an internet connection. Additionally, adult students with a family can come home from work and log in to their classroom after dinner and after the children go to bed. Those adults whose jobs require them to work non-traditional evening or night shifts can log in during times that suit them and not worry about losing sleep to attend face-to-face courses at a local college or university.
One of the earlier studies regarding persistence rates of adult students was published by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). In this study, researchers Laura Horn and Mark Premo identified seven risk factors that were associated with the likelihood that a student would not graduate from college. These risk factors were: being independent, attending college part-time, working full-time while enrolled, having dependents, being a single parent, delaying entry to college, and not having a traditional high school diploma. Working adults attempting to complete an associates’ or bachelor’s degree are likely to have at least three of these risk factors and those with children may have five or six.
