This study investigates the dropout behavior of college students in the United States. Previous attrition studies have typically focused on dropout at specific points in time, such as the first year of enrollment. In this study we examine the timing of dropout over a five-year period and find that factors that affect student dropout often have effects that change over time. For instance, the results demonstrate that students who receive financial aid generally have lower dropout rates than non-aided students. But of special interest is our findings that dropout rates vary depending on the amount and timing of student financial aid.
AN OVERVIEW OF STUDENT DEPARTURE THEORY The Student Integration ModelBased on Spady's work (1970, 1971) and Durkheim's Suicide Theory (1951), Tinto developed a model designed to explain the student departure process (1975,
We jointly model the application, admission, financial aid determination, and enrollment decision process. We simulate how enrollment and application behavior change when important factors like financial aid are permitted to vary. An innovation is the investigation into the role of financial aid expectations and how they relate to application and enrollment behavior.
Using national survey data and discrete-time logit modeling, this research seeks to understand whether student aid mediates the relationship between parental income and student dropout behavior. Our analysis confirms that there is a gap in dropout rates for lowincome students compared with their upper income peers, and suggests that some types of aid are associated with lower risks of dropout. Thus, we examine the interaction between financial aid type and parental income to explore whether, and if so how, different types of aid may reduce the dropout gap by income level group. We find that the receipt of a Pell grant is related to narrowing the dropout gap between students from low-and middleincome groups, although overall the interaction between Pell grant and income is not significant. Loans and work-study aid both have similar effects on student dropout across all income groups. Methodologically, our results demonstrate the need to model dropout behavior temporally and to avoid main-effect bias by incorporating interaction effects.
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