Adult workers in higher education: enhancing social mobility

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to verify if adult education can contribute to social mobility by analysing how the socioeconomic and professional background of the students affects dropout and graduation hazards in higher education. Design/methodology/approach An event history analysis approach, with competing risks and discrete time, implemented under a multinomial logit model, is used to investigate how an extensive set of covariates affects the risk of graduation, dropout and persistence of 834 adult student workers from a higher education institution in Portugal. Findings Adult education may indeed be effective in promoting social mobility, as academic achievement is higher for student workers that have low educated parents and low income levels. Also, the probability of achieving graduation seems to be higher for those seeking for higher transformation. Practical implications Adult education should be encouraged as it generates both efficiency and equity benefits. Some policy recommendations are suggested for the higher education system to adapt better to the particular characteristics of adult workers and provide conditions to improve the job–study–family conciliation, namely, by adjusting the schedule and composition of classes, appreciating the curriculum and providing orientation to candidates, and introducing shorter/simplified versions of the degrees. Originality/value A separate treatment is given to adult student workers, whose characteristics are very particular, enriching the literature on academic achievement that has been focussed on traditional students. Additionally, the studied data set merges five sources and provides extensive and original information on personal, degree and employment variables of the students.

Mature vs Young Working Students: Similarities, Differences, and Drivers of Graduation and Dropout

“…Also, working in a medium size organisation may contribute to increased graduation prospects, as compared to working in a micro, small or large organisation. Finally, in the case of mature working students, holding a qualified job may decrease the probability of dropping out, while, for young working students, enrolling in a course unrelated with their job seems to increase the likelihood of achieving graduation, which is probably related with the previously mentioned high motivation to invest in a new, qualified, and more rewarding professional career (Lopes & Carreira, 2018). This last result validates hypothesis H2 and confirms the importance of motivation for young working students.…”

“…Descriptive Statistics Figure 1 displays the dropout hazard functions, corresponding to the evolution of the probability of dropout occurring in year t conditional on the non-event having occurred in each year before t. Similar to the majority of related literature (e.g. Arias Ortiz & Dehon, 2013;Lopes & Carreira, 2018), dropout risk has a peak in year 1, decreases throughout the normal duration of the degree (three years), and increases again afterwards. However, there are visible differences between the two types of students.…”

“…Park and Choi (2009) identified low organisational support and low relevance of the course for the student as the main predictors of dropout among mature students; Venegas-Muggli (2020) found that students who are parents, have a job, are not the heads of their households, are enrolled in longer programmes, and who attended adult high school have a higher risk of dropping out. For Portugal, Lopes and Carreira (2018) concluded that dropout behaviour and/or graduation achievement of working students are influenced by the motivation for the course, family educational background (in contrast to the direction generally observed for traditional students), professional background, social integration, and peer effects. Santos et al (2016), focusing on explaining grades and not precisely on dropout behaviour, observed that the academic performance of M23 students seems to increase with age and to vary significantly across fields of study.…”

“…Additionally, the majority of previous studies have focused only on dropout risk, thus neglecting the competing risk of graduation, which can have distinct determinants (Arias Ortiz & Dehon, 2013;Lopes & Carreira, 2018;Scott & Kennedy, 2005). In this article we address this gap by jointly estimating the risks of graduation and dropout.…”

The role of AACSB accreditation in students' leadership motivation and students' citizenship motivation: business education perspective

“…Although learning for student leadership has been widely investigated in the literature (Garton and Wawrzynski, 2021;Lopes and Carreira, 2020;Skalicky et al, 2020;Shalka et al, 2019;Peck, 2018;Kiersch and Peters, 2017;Alani and Ilusanya, 2008), a research gap exists in investigations that consider student leadership as an endogenous construct related to organizational effectiveness, specifically in the context of accredited business schools. For this reason, to the best of our knowledge, this study is among the very first contributions where student leadership and citizenship are theoretically and empirically tested, based on five dimensions of organizational effectiveness (Cameron, 1978) in an accredited context.…”