Abstract
As higher education has made the transition from elite to mass enrolments, the student body has become more diverse and online and blended learning have become more common. This study aimed to examine the impacts on attrition of admitting a more diverse student body with the shift towards online and blended learning. The study compared models for universities at the traditional and contemporary ends of the spectrum, with respect to admission and course delivery. The hypothesised model for the contemporary university contained four presage variables related to the changed demographic of the student body and alternative modes of study: attendance mode, admission basis, remoteness and socio-economics status. There were two intervening variables: age and year of study. The three outcome variables were dropout, GPA value and proportion of units completed. Both models were tested against large samples of data from student record systems. The models showed a good fit to the data, predicting that the expansion of higher education, along with the increasing use of online and blended learning, will impact on attrition but the impact on GPA value and proportion of units completed are expected to be limited. The final model for the traditional university was simpler than that for the contemporary one; in particular it did not contain a variable for mode of study, as the only available mode was on-campus study. There were also fewer paths between variables, indicating the increased complexity of the contemporary model. The limitations of the models tested in this chapter was that variables included in the model were restricted to those readily available from the student records database. The models, therefore, included student characteristics on enrolment, but not constructs pertinent to teaching, learning and support during the course of study.
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Hicks, D., Leung, D.Y.P., Prosser, M. (2023). Modelling Retention and Success in Traditional and Contemporary Universities. In: Kember, D., Ellis, R.A., Fan, S., Trimble, A. (eds) Adapting to Online and Blended Learning in Higher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0898-1_10
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