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This article reports on a systematic review of research into student retention and student engagement in higher education. It discusses the origins and meaning of these terms, their relation to each other, their application and practice, and the issues and critiques which have arisen. The two concepts are seen as alternative ways of seeing and researching the same underlying issue. While student engagement is a more recent focus for research, it has now overtaken student retention in importance. As the responsibility for the financing of higher education has shifted from the state to the student, so the understanding of student retention and engagement has shifted from being the student's responsibility to that of the higher education institution.

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Articles published in three leading North American higher education journals during the year 2000 are compared with those published in three leading, English language, non-North American higher education journals (and with a larger sample of fourteen such journals). The comparison focuses on the location of their authors, the themes researched, the levels at which the analyses are pitched, the methods and methodologies employed, and the explicitness of both methodological and theoretical engagement. Compared to the non-North American sample, the North American articles evidence a dominance of North American-based authors, a greater focus on the student experience, and on institutional and national level studies, and a much stronger emphasis on multivariate analysis as a method. Articles in the North American sample were also more likely to be both methodologically and theoretically explicit. Possible reasons for the divergent patterns observed are identified and discussed.