Vincent Tinto’s research related to student retention is well known among academicians.  His 1975 paper in the Review of Educational Research creating a theoretical construct of the major factors leading to student retention has been cited in hundreds, if not thousands of papers and publications.  Additionally, Tinto’s sociological construct of the college dropout influenced future researchers toward examining the cause of dropouts instead of blaming the victim.  In 1987, Tinto published Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition (and later reprinted a second edition in 1993). That book is particularly significant to me for several reasons. 

In 2004, the American Public University System (APUS) Board of Trustees elected Dr. Kate Zatz as a new board member.  As APUS’s newly appointed president, I visited Dr. Zatz who worked at Hudson County Community College in Newark, New Jersey.  We talked about a number of things during my visit and I asked her if she could recommend any publications about student retention.  She handed me a copy of Leaving College and told me that it was an excellent resource for reading about student attrition research.  I read it and distributed copies to others at APUS.  Later on, Leaving College and my interest in student retention would inspire my doctoral dissertation and subsequent research related to online student retention.  When I received a pre-publication notice for Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action a few months ago, I ordered a copy.

In the preface to Completing College, Vincent Tinto states that the goal of his book is not to develop a new theory of retention but to suggest a framework that institutions can utilize in applying policies and actions to improve retention and college completion.  Based on the quantity of dog-eared pages and highlighted paragraphs in my copy, I would say that he has accomplished his goal.

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In 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.

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I had the opportunity to present a paper this week at the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education’s (AACE) E-Learn 2010 conference in Orlando along with Dr. Phil Ice, our Director of Course Design, Research & Development.  The paper, Comprehensive Assessment of Student Retention in Online Learning Environments, originated from research that I conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation at The University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Student retention has been an issue in higher education since the late 1800’s.  Some of the early research in the area began in the 1930’s but the volume of research studies increased substantially in the 1960’s through the present era.  Early research focused on psychological reasons for students to drop out of college but most of the literature since the late 1970’s have focused on sociological issues.

While there are many significant contributors to the research of student retention (William Spady, Alexander Astin,  Vincent Tinto, John M. Braxton, George Kuh, Ernest Pascarella, etc.), Vincent Tinto’s Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition provides a fairly thorough overview of many research studies (note:  the second edition of this book was published in 1994 and new copies are difficult to find).

Tinto is given credit for developing the first theoretical construct of predicting student retention.  Three major areas of his theory involve the importance of the background characteristics of college students, the social integration of students with their college, and the academic integration of students with their professors and programs.  Subsequent research studies have focused on some of these areas and/or attempted to prove or disprove the original construct.  Colleges and universities use some of the studies as the basis for their internal retention research or external explanations of their graduation rate.

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Earlier in the month, one of my colleagues sent me a link to an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, titled “The Ugly Secret Why Tuition Costs a Fortune.”  The article notes that in today’s somewhat unstable economy, the cost of most consumer goods are falling, yet higher education has somehow managed to insulate itself from this fundamental economic trend.  Examining why this has been the case, the article pulls from evidence found in Mark Bauerlein’s paper published by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own.”

Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, offers an eye-opening explanation of a starting trend in academia: the “publish or perish” dilemma facing young professors hoping to be hired or veteran faculty members on the path to tenure.  According to Bauerlein, between 1980 and 2006, William Faulkner garnered some “3,584 books, chapters, dissertations, articles, notes, reviews, and editions.”  In the same time period, Charles Dickens elicited 3,437 studies.  While there can be little question that scholarly critical works on these authors and others are worthwhile for full understanding of their works, one must begin to question how many works on any one author are required before the topic becomes “overdone.”  Bauerlein cites that the demand for a new book in the English literature area rarely exceeds 300 copies.

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Following up on my article regarding Adult Online Learners, I asked Phil McNair, our Vice President for Academic Services to discuss some of our efforts for more interactivity among our students.  Phil’s guest article is printed below.

A concern of many students attending college online is that they are not having a “real” college experience: no football games, no dormitories, no cafeterias or gyms or face to face interaction with fellow students.  Perhaps the biggest difference between online and traditional education is the social component; the sense of community (or lack thereof) one develops over time while engaging in learning activities.  Academics is one component of a learning environment, but not  the only component.  Traditional schools spend a significant amount of resources on the non-academic aspects of their programs with corresponding impacts on their tuition and fees. The budget for facilities maintenance on most large college campuses approaches the annual budget of APUS.  While this reality means that online schools should be able to offer courses for lower tuition than land-based schools, it does not necessarily signify that the two types of learning environments are otherwise equal. 

In short, community matters.  Much research has been done to validate that students who feel a sense of connection, or community, with their school are less likely to drop out than those with weaker ties.  The renowned retention expert Vincent Tinto has published numerous articles that identify community, along with academic quality and support services, as one of the key factors in influencing student behavior.  Students stay where they feel they belong; without a sense of community they may not feel like they are part of something to which it is worth belonging.

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