The Five Main Reasons Behind Student Enrollment and Later Drop-out
Emilia Andreeva-Moschen · 2020
Abstract The five main reasons behind student enrollment and later drop-outIn the last few years the number of applicants for technical studies has dropped, as have theknowledge levels they bring with them. The main challenge for our department with twointense engineering degree programs is to deal with this situation while satisfying the everincreasing requirements of industry and society.Due to the regulations at our university, which include a numerus clausus, we are keen tohave as many enrollees as possible. However, a larger number of applicants does notguarantee quality, although the probability of increased quality does rise.In contrast to other universities, to become a student in the department of AutomotiveEngineering, enrollees must participate in an admission procedure consisting of three parts:formal application, written test and personal interview. For many young people this is the firsttime in their life in a competitive environment and some of them prefer to go to otheruniversities without acceptance tests. The number of enrollees and the quality of knowledgethey bring with them when they begin their studies, both correlate significantly to studysuccess.In our work we investigated the main reasons for enrollment and later non-persistenceprocessing application and survey data. We inquired as to how young people informthemselves before choosing the study program and what factors they consider as they come toa decision.We proved a correlation between the admission procedure and the students’ study success.One of the key questions was whether bad marks or other diverse factors were the mainreasons for dropping-out from the degree program.The outcome of our work is a hypothesis regarding the main reasons for enrollment and non-persistence. We hope that these results will be useful for other academic institutions.