This publication summarizes the responses of the State University of New York constituent institutions to the 1991 Attrition/Retention Survey (91-10) administered by the Central Office of Institutional Research. It includes racial/ethnic detail and partial history of later cohorts as of fall 1991 along with trends in attrition and retention of…

In June 1990, a statewide telephone survey was conducted of 1,200 full- and part-time students from the 29 Michigan community colleges as a follow-up to a similar survey conducted in 1988. As in the previous study, the 29 colleges were classified as rural, urban, and suburban institutions and a total of 200 part-time and 200 full-time students…

In 1987-88, a study was conducted at Piedmont Virginia Community College to determine between-quarter retention rates for various student groups and to compare the characteristics of returning and non-returning students. The study used end-of-quarter data to determine retention rates based on headcount and full-time equivalency. Rates were also…

Student attrition at the Distance University in the Federal Republic of Germany was studied. The Distance University, which was founded in December 1974, offers the following departments: mathematics and computer sciences, electrical engineering, economics and law, and education and the social sciences. The university is directed toward people…

In 1989, a study was conducted of the persistence and graduation rates of full-time, degree-seeking students who enrolled in the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) for the first time in fall 1981 through fall 1986. Persistence was determined by the presence of the student in the enrolled student database, regardless of whether the student…

A study was conducted at St. Louis Community College to disaggregate statistics for fall 1985 nonreturning students by educational goal and full-time/part-time status in order to provide more meaningful data for both internal and external evaluation of student retention and outcomes. Study findings included the following: (1) the comparison of…

A longitudinal study was conducted at William Rainey Harper College (WRHC), in Illinois, to observe the performance and achievement of students entering the college each fall from 1967 through 1986. Academic and personal data from transcripts were analyzed for randomly selected samples of 200 full- and 200 part-time students from each fall's…

Academic persistence at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) was studied from fall 1979 through spring 1983. Attention was directed to the school's graduation rate and correlations between sex, race, major, grade point average (GPA) and persistence. Of the 1,043 students who were beginning freshmen in 1979, the study sample consisted of…

As a response to the problems of nontraditional student attrition at two-year and four-year urban colleges, this paper introduces the constructs of career decision-making self-efficacy, perceived stress, and financial difficulty into a model built on the synthesis of Cabrera (1993). A questionnaire was administered to adult nontraditional (age 24…

This study, which is a companion to a study on 10-year enrollment and graduation patterns for new freshmen and transfers, sought to quantify how much more likely college students were to graduate if they were transfers, were enrolled continuously, were mostly full-time, and began their academic careers with good first-semester grade point averages…

In 1988, a retrospective study was conducted at the City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) of the enrollment patterns of 1,521 students who graduated from the district in spring 1987. The study was designed to determine the length of time it took a sample of CCC graduates to receive a two-year degree. Data for the study were drawn from computerized and…

A study was conducted using enrollment and program completion data for fiscal years (FY's) 1984 through 1987 to analyze female student participation at the Illinois public community colleges. Study findings included the following: (1) female students comprised 57.7% of the colleges' enrollments over the 4 years of the study, representing 51% of…

Females, minorities, and older students are entering higher education at an increasing rate. The influx of these "nontraditional" students has led to quite different enrollment patterns, in which stopping out of college and part-time enrollment are common. Most students have objectives that are not synonymous with earning a baccalaureate degree…

This study utilized data from the "NCES Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS 96/01)" to explore the 6-year persistence status of Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) students seeking the bachelor's degree at four-year institutions irrespective of whether they had remained at their initial institution, transferred, temporarily…

Describing outcomes related to student retention and graduation in the University System of Georgia, this six-part report discusses definitions and assumptions pertaining to retention and compares success rates for black, white, developmental studies, and regularly-admitted freshmen students in USG senior and two-year colleges. Section 1 provides…