Students’ early impressions of a university can help predict whether they will remain until they graduate, according to a recent study from two university doctoral candidates.
The finding may seem obvious, Corbin Campbell and Jessica Mislevy concede, but the two said they believe their research can help university administrators prevent students from dropping out.
“What we really hoped to find was whether we could identify some warning signs early on, eight weeks in,” said Campbell, a higher education graduate student. The study suggests that future enrollment patterns can be predicted as early as eight weeks into a student’s freshman semester.
Campbell and Mislevy studied the responses of 2,084 first-time, full-time, degree-seeking freshmen at this university from a Beginning Student Survey administered in 2002. The survey asked students about their expectations, attitudes and behaviors after their first eight weeks.
The researchers studied dozens of different items from the survey to see which ones predict students’ enrollment behavior. Above all other factors, they found general attitude toward the university was the most powerful enrollment predictor — students reporting a more negative attitude toward the university were the most likely to drop out, transfer out or take time off.
Erin Werner, who graduated in May as an elementary education major, said the survey’s results track her experience.
“I was really excited to be at Maryland in my first semester … so I’d say this would be a really good predictor,” Werner said.
Jennifer Jenkins, a senior elementary education major who transferred from American University to this university after her freshman year, said more school spirit would have kept her in place.
“Finance was a big reason why I transferred, but had I liked the school in general, I would’ve stuck it out,” Jenkins said. She added, however, that there wasn’t much American’s administrators could have done to keep her enrolled.
This university’s advisors and administrators are already reviewing the study for possible lessons they could apply here.
“The big piece I took away was that the first part of the first semester is critical in solidifying in students’ minds that this is where they want to be,” said Britt Reynolds, director of undergraduate admissions.
“We should take this information and use it as we can. … We want to make students as comfortable as possible right from the start,” Reynolds added.
The study also found a few different enrollment predictors between male and female students. In the results, only the attitude factor stood out among men, while the data about women were more complex. Other factors also correlated to their graduation rate from the university — for example, out-of-state female students were more likely to transfer out than in-state female students, and white women were more likely to take time off before graduating than black, Latina and Asian women.
It also found that six semesters after the survey had been issued, 76 percent of the student respondents remained continuously enrolled at the university; 12 percent were enrolled but had at some point taken time off from university; 8 percent had transferred to other schools and 5 percent had dropped out of college entirely.
“Overall, students are likely to stay,” Campbell said.
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