Making sense of attrition: Why do students drop out?

Universities want their students to progress and succeed, and so minimizing attrition is an important focus area for all institutions – including the partners of Circle U. 

The question is how best to do it?

During the pilot phase of Circle U, a working group led by Aarhus University (AU) was tasked with exploring learning analytics as a way to identify possible patterns in attrition. This could potentially make it possible to explain or even predict which students are most at risk of dropping out – and subsequently where to concentrate efforts to prevent it. 

Working with analyses done at three partner universities, the group looked at a range of different variables for their correlation with attrition, and study programme proved to be the most significant one of them all. 

“Of course our dataset is too small to make any definitive or universal conclusions, but it would definitely make sense as a first step for any university to hone in on those study programmes that have the highest level of attrition”, says administrative officer at AU, Pernille Kirk Jensen, who was part of the working group. 

Focus on new students

Even though the working group are hesitant to make any stern recommendations, their analysis indicates that institutions would do well to focus on first-year Bachelor’s students, and particularly the ones who earn the least number of credits during the first year of study. 

“It makes a lot of sense intuitively to focus interventions on new students who fail to follow the normal rate of progression, and the data seems to back it up: As the number of credits decrease, the likelihood of dropout increases”, says Jensen.

The working group also looked at other factors, such as grades from qualifying exams, parents’ educational background, and level of motivation, but the underlying data were not quite strong enough to indicate any clear patterns. 

This is why the group encourages the rest of the partners to get involved in the efforts to use learning analytics in the coming roll-put period:

“In the next phase of the collaboration, Circle U. will establish a task force for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) lead by Humboldt University and King’s College. One of their missions will be to move alliance members towards a more systematic use of learning analytics, and I hope this will lead to more data and better analyses that can be put to use in our efforts to help more students succeed at our universities”, Pernille Kirk Jensen concludes.