Structuring First-Year Retention at a Regional Public Institution: Validating and Refining Bowman’s SEM Analysis

Sometimes a Long and Winding Road: An Exploration of Kalamazoo Promise Stop Out and Reenrollment

“…To be noted, high school-related performance consisted of 60% of the reported model's variance. Altogether, the findings in the 4-year model reinforce the importance of pre-college performance to college-related outcomes (see, for example, Bowman et al, 2019;Collier, Fitzpatrick, Brehm, et al, 2020) and suggest that upon reenrollment, students who had previously performed well are more likely to persist towards earning a 4-year degree (Table 4, Model 2).…”

“…Next, we found that nearly half of Kalamazoo Promise students who have stopped out returned to a postsecondary institution-far exceeding rates associated with the State of Michigan and the nation (Shapiro et al, 2019). Given our findings surrounding who may be more likely to stop out and the intertwined nature of socioeconomic advantage and pre-college performance (Collier, Fitzpatrick, Brehm, et al, 2020), tuition-free policies that are "oneand-done" or require continuous enrollment are likely punishing less advantaged students as the opportunity to access the scholarship is closed upon a stop out. Considering we found that on average students tend to reenroll within two academic years (median of 3 fall/spring semesters) after stopping out, modifying "one-and-done" expectations towards a more lenient policy allowing students to stop out and return within this timeframe may help an increased share of less advantaged students earn credentials.…”

“…We defined stop out as a disruption of continuous enrollment for first time in any college (FTIAC) students’ starting institution, excluding summer periods, without having obtained a degree. This definition of stop out could also be considered a measurement of institutional retention and is widely used in higher education research examining first-year persistence (see—Bowman et al., 2019; Collier, Fitzpatrick, Brehm, et al., 2020). This definition is rather common, allowing us to draw from a robust set of established studies to link with our findings and discussion.…”

“…More affluent children are also mentored through postsecondary processes such as filing a FAFSA (Feeney & Heroff, 2013) and navigating other college-related bureaucratic systems. Additionally, students’ socioeconomic advantages are influential in bolstering desired college students’ non-cognitive attributes (Bowman et al., 2019) and contribute to students’ social adjustment in college (Collier, Fitzpatrick, Brehm, et al., 2020).…”

“…These findings were shored up in research controlling for non-cognitive attributes on KPromise students enrolled at WMU (Collier, Parnther, Fitzpatrick, Brehm, & Beach, 2019). Given such findings and longstanding connections between high school GPA and college performance and persistence (Bowman et al., 2019; Collier, Fitzpatrick, Brehm, Hearit, & Beach, 2020), we would expect that high school performance measurements would remain significantly related to stopping out when examining all KPromise students.…”