Factors Affecting Attendance in a Junior College Adult Program

Abstract

ADULT EDUCATION is plagued by an enrollment and attendance syndrome.Courses are offered in terms of anticipated enrollment and discontinued when attendance falls below administratively set minimums without regard to social utility or individual need. The financial structure of adult education is based on enrollment and/ or attendance so that the number of participants rather than educational desirability determines the nature, content and quality of adult education.In spite of this preoccupation with enrollment and attendance, adult education has done little to understand the causes of discontinuance of attendance or to attempt to discover ways whereby organizational patterns and procedures might be altered to modify the rate of discontinuance.&dquo; The questions of enrollment and attendance are extremely difficult to study and too few administrators collect the kind of data or maintain the kinds of records that make studies in this area possible. Such research as does exist is scant and inconclusive, as it has not been approached systematically from a theoretical base that is conducive to the orderly accumulation of substantive facts about the problem. Until such time as a theoretical structure is established, research in this area must continue to ex-amine the problem in isolation, exploring different facets of it without providing any results applicable to the problem as a whole. The study reported here falls into this category.a 2 The ProblemThis study seeks to determine if there are any significant differences between those students who persist in attendance and those who discontinue in terms of certain measurable factors. These factors, expressed as hypothesis in the null form, include age, sex, marital status, course load, veteran or non-veteran, number of class sessions per week, admission prerequisites, completion of prior semester, and distance travelled to the institution. These hypotheses were tested by the appropriate statistical processes as indicated below, with the .01 level of confidence determining the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis. The SettingThe adult evening class program at the Meridian Mississippi Junior College is a traditional academic program that offers regular college credit courses on the freshman and sophomore level. The courses meet three times per week on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights in fifty-minute periods. The admission policies, atat MOUNT ALLISON UNIV on June 13, 2015 aeq.sagepub.com Downloaded from

Educational Participation and Dropout: a Theoretical Model

“…Again, single variable studies have generally failed to explain or predict what is a multi-variate phenomenon. Ulmer & Verner's (37) observation that research is &dquo;scant and inconclusive as it has not been approached on accumulation of substantive facts about the problem&dquo; still largely applies today.…”

Educational background on entry and drop-out from part-time undergraduate studies

“…Ulmer and Verner [2] found a lower rate of discontinuance among students admitted on the basis of General Educational Development Test than for students who were high school graduates. Other studies [3] show that students admitted on the basis of maturity do exceptionally well in university credit courses.…”