Examined three stages of University of Iowa students' progress to graduation: dropout versus persistence in the first year, graduation versus failure to graduate among first-year persisters, and graduation in 4 years or less versus graduation in 5 years or more. Found that college academic performance, pre-matriculation academic achievement, and…

Used the National Center for Education Statistics' postsecondary transcript file of the High School and Beyond/Sophomore Cohort to replicate findings of Adelman's "Answers in the Tool Box" study. Used event history modeling to provide additional information about how several factors affect time to bachelor's degree attainment. Findings concurred…

Asserting that graduation and stopout are "competing" or correlated events and that they often should be modeled as such, this study demonstrated that factors affecting timely graduation (e.g., financial aid) often have time-varying effects, and that ignoring these time-varying effects can lead to spurious conclusions that may result in…

Rather than studying the structural paths through which variables affect student persistence in education, this paper offers a reduced form model that focuses on precollege, demographic, and certain current achievement and financial aid variables. This approach does not specify structural paths, but it does have the advantage of requiring only…

This study describes the use of event history modeling as a tool for understanding student departure from college. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics High School and Beyond (HS&B)/Sophomore Cohort longitudinal study a detailed history of individual students' college careers was constructed using a regression-like…