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.

Other studies of persistence relating to adult students provide explanations and characteristics of transfer students.  Noting that my own research indicated that students who had transferred credits were  more likely to graduate than those who did not transfer credit, I reviewed some of the literature about transfer students and student attendance patterns.  Wright and de los Santos wrote about this phenomenon in “Maricopa’s Swirling Students: Earning One-Third of Arizona State’s Bachelor’s Degrees” in 1990.  Later, director of Indiana University’s National Survey of Student Engagement, Alex McCormick, wrote a research article titled “Swirling and Double-Dipping: New Patterns of Student Attendance and Their Implications for Higher Education,” outlining the various patterns of student attendance and their implications.  In his article, McCormick attributes the likelihood of students to attend multiple institutions to the standardization of credits and the ability to transfer credits from one institution to another rather easily.  McCormick outlines eight different patterns of attendance for swirling students.  These are: 
• Trial enrollment – Students experimenting with another institution before formally transferring
• Special program enrollment – Students completing most of their coursework at their home institution but completing a special program (e.g., semester abroad) elsewhere
• Supplemental enrollment – Students enrolling at another institution for one or more terms to supplement or accelerate their program (examples include summer programs or taking a course at another institution because it’s unavailable at the home institution)
• Rebounding enrollment – Students alternating enrollment at two or more institutions
• Concurrent enrollment – Students taking courses at two institutions simultaneously
• Consolidated enrollment – Students who satisfy their home institution’s residency requirements but a substantial number of their credits come from at least two other institutions
• Serial transfer – Students who make one or more intermediate transfers sequentially in order to complete a degree
• Independent enrollment – Students pursue work unrelated to their degree program and no credits are transferred

McCormick notes that several longitudinal studies exist and while they provide descriptions of attendance patterns, they fail to provide explanations for those patterns.  He cites Clifford Adelman’s 1999 study that examined the longitudinal data of the 1982 high school graduates’ cohort and identified that students who attended multiple institutions accounted for approximately 60 percent of all students who began at four year institutions.  Approximately 37 percent of all students from the 1982 cohort attended two institutions and 22 percent attended three institutions.  Confirming some of the classifications outlined by McCormick was Adelman’s finding that three in five of the 1982 graduates who attended two institutions returned to their first college, as did half of the 1982 graduates who attended three colleges.  It’s important to note that Adelman’s longitudinal study over 16 years examined college attendance data over a much longer period than the NCES data required to be reported by institutions participating in the Federal Student Aid program.

The studies mentioned by McCormick and Adelman are excellent starting points for discussions about why more research is necessary to determine the explanations of student swirling.  Is it possible that adult students might attend even more institutions today because the availability and popularity of online courses and programs has increased substantially over the past decade?  The Sloan Consortium’s most recent publication, Going the Distance:  Online Education in the United States 2011, has identified that nearly one third of all college students completed at least one online course in 2010-2011.  At the recent Council of College and Military Educators (CCME) Conference, the Department of Defense reported that 75 percent of all military tuition assistance payments were for students attending online programs.  While the military may be more mobile than most working professionals, the data otherwise supports the increasing trend of adult students enrolled in online courses/programs.  As noted earlier, the risk factors for college completion are compounded for working adult students and may lead to explanations of some institutions’ student transfers.

More and more, I am convinced that the United States needs a national database that tracks the progress of college students as they attend multiple institutions.  The Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and managed by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) Cooperative for Education Technologies has a database with 640,000 student records from students attending online programs at six different institutions.  That’s approximately 10 percent of the students who took online courses last year according to the Sloan survey mentioned earlier.  The National Student Clearinghouse provides data as it is contributed by participating institutions, but institutions are not required to belong to the consortium and only recently has the Clearinghouse been able to accept student data from institutions with non-traditional financial aid enrollment periods.  In addition, that data does not aggregate by institutional profile in a more granular format (adult serving, commuter college, online, etc.). 

During the last reauthorization of the Higher Education Opportunity Act in 2008, Congress inserted a provision prohibiting the Department of Education from creating such a database.  To quote McCormick, “if educators, policymakers, and researchers are to assess institutional impact, they will need better information about [an] institution’s attendance profile, if not detailed information about the source of credits at the student level.”  As Adelman and others have identified, there are multiple types of institutional profiles as well as profiles of students who attend those institutions.  Before a policymaker or pundit makes a disparaging remark about student persistence rates at a particular institution or group of institutions, they need to have data far beyond that related to first-time, full-time students that has been the baseline for institutional reporting to the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS).  Institutions and researchers should collaborate to provide more insights to explanations for adult student drop out beyond “life happens.”  More research on adult student swirling needs to be conducted, particularly for those students attending online programs or institutions.

The College Board states that all costs of college attendance are important and that often, costs such as room and board and books influence the ability of a student to afford college more so than tuition and fees.  The College Board encourages readers to cite or reproduce the data as long as they are given proper attribution, so I’ll list a few facts that I found interesting in this year’s report.

In 2008-2009, the average published tuition and fees increased:
 Public four year   6.4%
 Private four year  5.9%
 Public two year    4.7%
 For profits           4.5%
The public four year in-state tuition and fees averaged $6,585 plus $7,748 room and board for a total charge average of $14,333.

Page 7 of this year’s report has an interesting chart called “Variation in Tuition and Fees, 2008-09.”  This chart shows the distribution in tuition and fees by category.  For example, 78% of public four year colleges have tuition and fees less than $9,000 annually whereas only 7% of private four year colleges and universities fall into that category (note that APUS‘ full-time undergraduate tuition and fees would be $7,500 per annum).  Another interesting chart examines the variation in tuition and fees and notes that while public four year colleges increased their tuition and fees on average 6.4% versus the 5.9% at private colleges, the dollar increase average at public four year colleges was $380 versus $1,484 at private colleges (due to the substantially higher tuition).

Net price is another area where the data collected is interesting.  In 2008-2009, private college full-time students received an average financial aid award of $10,200.  This amount reflects all sources (institutional and federal) and includes the federal tax benefits.  Thus, the net tuition and fees average is reduced to $14,900 from $25,100.  At public four year colleges the average financial aid is $3,700 which reduces tuition and fees to $2,900 (net) from $6,600.  At two year colleges, full time students received $2,300 in aid reducing the $2,400 in tuition and fees to $100 net.

The net pricing data confirms other theories about college access including “the higher the tuition, the less affordable college attendance is for students in the lower income group.”  Measuring Up 2006 is a report published by The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.  In December, Measuring Up 2008 will be published.  That group breaks out the cost of college attendance by quintiles of family income.  The College Board states that “the federal Pell Grant program provides about half of the grants received by full-time students at public two year colleges and a quarter of the grants received by full-time students at public four year colleges, but only about 10% for students at private colleges.”  With the wide disparity in net price cited above (from $14,900 to $2,900 to $100), it’s understandable why students from families with lower incomes would choose more affordable options or no college at all.

Concerns about the cost of college attendance caused Congress to act.  The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) passed in July of this year has a number of cost-related disclosure and reporting requirements for colleges.  Among them, HEOA introduces the concept of net price (similar to the above except it does not include the federal tax benefits received by a student), requires the Department of Education to publish on its website the top five percent of colleges and universities with (1) the highest tuition and fees for the most recent academic year, (2) the highest net price for the most recent academic year, (3) the largest percentage increase in tuition and fees over the most recent three academic  years, and (4) the largest percentage increase in net price over the most recent three academic years.  These reports will be categorized among nine institutional categories.  Schools in the lists on (3) and (4) will have to submit a written report to the Department of Education explaining the increases and the steps that they’re taking to reduce future costs of attendance.

Affordability can expand access to college.  It will be interesting to see if the current economic downturn will change the pricing trends or if they will accelerate upward due to some of the budgetary crises at the state level and the endowment issues at the private college level.