What predicts student decision to leave? A new perspective on academic attrition

Abstract

The issue of attrition from higher education is a significant problem across Europe and especially Norway, where dropout rates are as high as 20-25%. In the current study, we address the issue from the perspective of attrition intentions that have been found closely associated with actual attrition behavior. In particular, we attempted to differentiate between types of students’ attrition intentions: dropping-out, transferring-out, and stopping-out. We assumed that mechanisms causing these intentions are not the same. Consequently, we investigated a relative significance of previously researched predictors (motivation, performance, and academic self-efficacy) and ones proposed in the current study (lack of energy, academic study skills, academic effort, and procrastination). A questionnaire was distributed among students of UiT The Arctic University of Norway (N = 491). Results indicated that study motivation was a more significant predictor of drop-out intentions than academic self-efficacy. In the enhanced model, lack of energy to initiate academic behavior and its interaction with procrastination were statistically significant. In contrast, none of the models were significant for the explanation of students’ transfer-out intentions.