Ciclo del Capital en la economía dependiente

Attrition refers to the loss of students from something, retention refers to the students staying within something, completion refers to the conclusion of something by the students and progress refers to progress of students through something. That “something” may be a unit, a module, a subject, a year of a multi-year course, a whole course or, in the case of attrition and retention, a sector within an institution, an institution, a sector of the tertiary education system or the tertiary education system as a whole. (p. 3)

As there are “new government funding strategies that place an emphasis on completion rather than enrolment” (Darlaston-Jones et al., 2003, p. 3), there is a growing need to understand why any students fail to complete at any level of their studies.

Research in this area reports a range of interacting factors that affect university retention rates at personal, social and institutional levels (Berger & Braxton, 1998; Tinto, 1975 and 1988). These include issues relating to finance and employment (Sinclair & Dale, 2000; Wessel et al., 2006; Zhai & Monzon, 2001); prior academic achievement (McMillan, 2005; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, 2005; Simpson, 2003); course preference and course fit (Callan, 2005; Hillman, 2005; Krause et al., 2005; McMillan, 2005; Queensland Studies Authorities, 2004; Summers, 2003); quality of teaching (Callan, 2005; Polesel et al., 2004); language background (James et al., 2004; McMillan, 2005); student engagement (Tinto, 1975); peer assistance (Astin, 1993; Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005); family support (Ozga & Sukhnandan, 1997); institutional habitus (Thomas, 2002); and background characteristics (Dobson, 1999; McInnis, James, & Hartley, 2000; Shields, 1995).

These factors can be grouped into five broad categories that explain student attrition from sociological, organisational, psychological, cultural and economic perspectives. The sociological explanation, which incorporates Tinto’s (1993) Model of Student Departure, argues that first students must detach themselves from the groups they formed before university- friends, family - and go through a transition period “during which the person begins to interact in new ways with the members of the new group into which membership is sought” (p. 93). For Tinto, students who drop out are those who cannot successfully separate themselves sufficiently from their previous attachments and adapt to their new learning environments and new groups. Tinto argues that the students’ academic and social integration are also important to student retention. According to Kuh et al. (2011) “social integration is often measured as a composite of interactions with peers and interactions between faculty and students, while academic integration reflects satisfaction with academic progress and choice of major” (p. 29). Research carried out to test Tinto’s model has shown that social integration is a more robust predictor of student persistence than academic integration (Kuh & Love, 2000).

The organisational perspective argues that a university’s structure, size, resources and student-staff ratio influence student retention. This perspective uses Bean’s (1980) student attrition model to describe the belief-attitudes-behaviour-intent loop, where the dashes between words represent ‘is shaped by’. Thus, students’ experiences with staff and the institution shape how they feel about the institution and that “students’ perceptions of the fairness of institutional policies and the responsiveness of faculty and staff presumably affect decisions to persist or leave the institution” (Kuh et al., 2011, pp. 30-31).

The psychological explanation of student retention focuses on students’ personality traits to explain the likelihood that students will drop out. Individuals with higher self-efficacy, higher

confidence in their academic abilities and internal loci of control tended to persist through their course (Bean & Eaton, 2000; Dweck, 2000). The psychological perspective further relies on psychology contract theory (Rousseau, 1995), which postulates that students have an expectation about the staff-student and institution-student relationship and when these expectations are not met, students are more likely to drop out (Rousseau, 1995).

The cultural explanation of student retention argues that students who come from under- represented groups might not be able to benefit from the university’s resources (Fischer, 2007; Tierney, 1992). The cultural perspective argues that “minority students’ cultural backgrounds often differ from the Eurocentric frameworks upon which the norms and values at predominantly White institutions are based” (Guiffrida, 2006, p. 451) and as such, interactionist models such as that proposed by Tinto, arguing that a separation from one’s previous groups is necessary to integrate into the new university groups, is culturally biased. The cultural perspective argues that for many cultural groups, the bond that exists between student, family and friends cannot be broken; and that in fact support from those bonds increases the chance that students succeed (Guiffrida, 2006; Tierney, 1992 and 1999). Thomas (2002) argues that:

If an institutional habitus is inclusive and accepting of difference, and does not prioritize or valorize one set of characteristics, but rather celebrates and prizes diversity and difference, students from diverse backgrounds will find greater acceptance of and respect for their own practices and knowledge, and this in turn will promote higher levels of persistence in HE (p. 431).

Institutional habitus was defined as “the impact of a cultural group or social class on an individual’s behaviour as it is mediated through an organisation” (Reay et al., 2001 cited in

Thomas, 2002, p. 431). The cultural perspective thus maintains that the ways in which universities cater for students’ cultural values play an important role in student retention.

Finally, the economic explanation looks at the cost-benefit equation of undertaking higher education. If the costs of pursuing HE is higher than forgoing this education, a student might drop out (Sinclair and Dale, 2000; Wessel et al., 2006; Zhai & Monzon, 2001).

Student retention is a complex phenomenon, most probably influenced by a combination of the above factors. For some international students, it could be a mixture of cost, course/institution fit, being valued at the institution (i.e. institutional habitus) and the students’ backgrounds. For those international students whose cultural backgrounds are not valued and promoted through the institutional practices, attrition rates might be higher (Thomas, 2002).

Whatever combination of factors is relevant in different individual situations; the research has clearly indicated the important role that the institution plays in supporting students throughout the course of their study (McLaughlin, Brozovsky & McLaughlin, 1998; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005; Thomas, 2002). It has been argued that “it is more cost effective to strive to retain the students we enrol than to recruit new students and ultimately more beneficial for both the university community as a whole and for our students” (Gabb, Milne & Cao, 2006). Thus, institutions which rely heavily on international student fees need to be aware of the factors that influence retention, and aim to provide appropriate services for this student cohort.