Course withdrawal: a comparison of business and engineering students in a private university
Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education
ISSN: 2050-7003
Article publication date: 9 May 2019
Issue publication date: 2 October 2019
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the course withdrawal behavior of business and engineering students in a private university. While previous research has studied such behavior, the literature remains sparse and dated.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses a negative binomial model in order to model the total number of course withdrawals for 760 students. The data set includes all courses taken by the students, with a total of 25,160 course outcomes.
Findings
Among the findings of the study are that males withdraw from courses more than females, engineering courses have the highest withdrawal rates, and male engineering students withdraw more than any other group.
Originality/value
While dropping out of college has received cross-national interest, the same cannot be said of course withdrawal. Most research to date has been conducted in a community college setting or has used a subset of the courses taken by students at universities in the USA. Thus, this is one of the first studies to investigate course withdrawal in another country.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Competing interest statement: the authors declare no conflict of interest. Compliance with ethical standards: the data used in this study were collected with the knowledge and consent of the university. A draft of this paper was also submitted for internal review in the university in order to ensure that information pertaining to individual students was not revealed. Following the review, final permission was granted by the Vice President of Academic Affairs. Funding statement: this research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Citation
Mozahem, N. (2019), "Course withdrawal: a comparison of business and engineering students in a private university", Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 828-843. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-11-2018-0225
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited