Abstract:

Student attrition from (under)graduate programs has always affected different universities in different measures. Although attrition is a universal problem in higher education, STEM fields, with a particular accent on engineering, are commonly portrayed as being majors with the highest attrition rates. Such a high percentage of students leaving their studies is particularly interesting in the contemporary perspective of higher-education institutions being a part of a service economy where student satisfaction is king. As members of the service economy, universities strive to retain students by offering them a string of perks ranging from academic to financial, and social. Although this modus operandi has become the norm in contemporary higher education, not all universities succeed in retaining students, as is documented in the vast literature on student retention research. Thus, the goal of this article is to provide a summary of the aforementioned literature as well as to pave the path to a research on retention and attrition to be conducted on undergraduate students of FAMENA. In order to better ascertain which factors might influence attrition, and, consecutively, which strategies might be implemented to retain students, a preliminary research has been conducted on secondary data provided by FAMENA’s admissions office to examine their basic demographic and academic attributes. Insights provided by the combination of literature review, and secondary data analysis resulted in the construction of a conceptually sound scale to be tested and used in further research.

Keywords:

Student attrition, student retention, conceptualization, dropout student demographics.