Multilevel modeling of persistence in higher education

Abstract

The dropout or evasion rates in higher education are now a social and institutional concern, justifying the implementation of public policies to prevent this phenomenon. These policies need studies on the most determinant variables of the risk of dropout. The main objective of this study is to analyze the student's persistence in undergraduate courses, and the relationship with the student's previous school trajectory and with the conditions of entrance into higher education, controlling for students' sociodemographic characteristics, such as gender and age. We applied multilevel logistic regression models to data of 2.697 freshmen enrolled in a Portuguese public university in the academic year 2015/16. The results suggest that failure in basic education (ISCED 2) has a long-term effect. According to the estimates obtained, students who declare not having failed in basic education have odds ratio of persistence 2.7 times higher than students who declare having failed in basic education. The conditions of student's admission to the course he/she attends are relevant variables to persistence in Higher Education, for example, whether s/he was admitted to her/his first option course and the student's university entrance score. The results also show that older and male students have lower probability of persistence.

Student’s access and performance in the Portuguese Higher Education: Issues of gender, age, socio-cultural background, expectations, and program choice

“…In turn, student persistence is statistically associated with all the individual variables studied except for socio-cultural origin. That is, the students' socio-cultural origin does not seem to influence their decision to abandon, suspend or transfer programmes, at least during the first year, which corroborates the results obtained through the application of a multilevel logistic regression model in which the relationship between socio-cultural origin and persistence is controlled by individual variables such as gender, age, experience of no promotion up to the ninth year (ISCED 2), entry exam grade, and student's admission into the first option programme (Ferrão & Almeida, 2018b). Such a result, to be confirmed throughout the programme, may be the manifest of an institutional equity policy that is worth noting, since it runs counter to previous results, according to which the phenomenon of abandonment and failure in HE especially penalized students from disadvantaged social strata (Almeida et al, 2006;Engrácia & Baptista, 2018).…”

Differential effect of university entrance score on first-year students’ academic performance in Portugal

“…The results do not provide evidence at the level of significance of 5% to allow us to say that the first-choice course matters in their academic performance. However, according to the results obtained by Ferrão and Almeida (2018), the admission of the student to their first option programme is important for their persistence over the first year of studies. The estimates presented suggest that the odds ratio in the persistence of students who were admitted in their first option programme is 1.85.…”

Uma década da Prova Brasil: evolução do desempenho e da aprovação

“…Quanto ao nível socioeconômico, os resultados vão na direção do que recentemente foi analisado por Ferrão et al (2018), que demostraram que o nível socioeconômico do aluno, a alfabetização da mãe e a situação do aluno em relação ao trabalho têm efeitos nos resultados de aprendizagem em matemática e língua portuguesa obtidos pelo aluno na Prova Brasil 2015 (9º ano). Contudo, a comparação entre modelos de resultados contextualizados e modelos de valor acrescentado mostra, igualmente, que, quando aquelas relações são controladas pelo conhecimento prévio do aluno aferido pela Prova Brasil 2011 (5º ano), aqueles efeitos perdem magnitude.…”