Antecedents of Student Retention: A Predictive Modelling Approach

Today university and college rankings are the major determinants influencing the enrollment decision of the current student. Universities improving on certain aspects are found to retain a majority of freshman students despite the university tier status. These aspects are seen to determine a student’s retention, which eventually helps the university to attend a higher tier status. The study tries to evaluate the aspects which primarily influence the future enrollment decision, thereby resulting in retaining the student. The evaluated aspects deal with the intrinsic factors responsible to support the academic tenure of a current student. The aspects, mainly revolve around the factors like peer effectiveness, academic progress, and academic advising out of which academic advising is a controlled variable addressed by the university administration. Two other variables are seen to indirectly be controlled by the administration. In the initial stage principal component analysis is used to identify the factors, followed by multiple regression analysis to determine the influence of each factor on the likelihood of retention. To validate the facts logistic regression analysis is used to verify the same factors that influence the actual retention of the student.