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Institutional Characteristics and College Student Dropout Risks: A Multilevel Event History Analysis

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Abstract

In the past two decades, although access to higher education for American students has improved, student persistence in 4-year institutions is far from assured. There have been a number of research studies on student persistence/dropout in higher education, but most have focused on the characteristics and behavior of students as illustrated by the “student-centered research tradition”. This study focuses on what institutional characteristics contribute to conditions that reduce student dropout risks. By analyzing longitudinal and hierarchical data, this research proposes and tests a multilevel event history model that identifies the major institutional attributes related to student dropout risk in a longitudinal process. Evidence indicates that institutional expenditure on student services is negatively associated with student dropout behavior. Implications of the results for institutional practices and future research are discussed.

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Notes

  1. The IPEDS data for this study are from the Delta Cost Project (http://www.deltacostproject.org), which provides a user-friendly interface (Schneider 2010).

  2. The low high school GPA ranges from D− to B−, middle GPA ranges from B to B+, and high GPA ranges from A− to A.

  3. Following the work of John Smart (Smart and Umbach 2007) and Paul Umbach (Umbach and Milem 2004), this study utilizes John Holland’s concept of six disciplinary clusters for recoding college student majors in the first year. Detailed discussion about the categorization can be found in Smart and Umbach (2007).

  4. Following previous work (Zhang and Ness 2010), this study used the interpolation method for imputing missing values in panel data.

  5. This range does not include the estimated probability for an outlier institution, which will be discussed later in the paper.

  6. There are two exceptions. Results demonstrate that the relationship between Pell grants and dropout risks and between unsubsidized loans and dropout risks are significantly stronger in the fourth year or sixth year than in the first year (results are available upon request). It is questionable how much significance should be attached to these interactions because there is a small level of risk remaining by this late stage of a college career, which may lead to imprecise estimates.

  7. Student service, according to the definition in IPEDS, is a functional expense category that includes expenses for activities whose primary purpose is to contribute to students’ emotional and physical well-being and to their intellectual, cultural, and social development outside the context of the formal instructional program (NCES 2002).

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Acknowledgments

This research is based upon work supported by the Association for Institutional Research, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Science Foundation, and the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative under Association for Institutional Research Grant # RG10-119. Financial support is gratefully acknowledged. The comments from the anonymous reviewers are very constructive and are greatly appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education Leadership, Management and Policy, College of Education and Human Services, Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ, 07079, USA

    Rong Chen

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Correspondence to Rong Chen.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 Variables in the study and corresponding names in BPS/IPEDS
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Chen, R. Institutional Characteristics and College Student Dropout Risks: A Multilevel Event History Analysis. Res High Educ 53, 487–505 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-011-9241-4

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