Are Leavers and Persisters Really Different: A Comparative Study of Issues Reported in GC Advising Files

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine whether GC leavers and persisters had different issues reported in their advising files. Information from persisters’ files was compared to a prior analysis of leavers from the GC 2003 NHS cohort. It was found that persisters and leavers were not significantly different in frequency and categories of issues reported. Persisters and leavers had similar proportions of issues reported in four categories: student academic, student non-academic, institutional academic, and institutional non-academic issues. Among both groups, academic issues were reported more often than non-academic issues, and student issues were reported more often than institutional issues. Persisters and leavers were also similar in rank orders of frequency of individual issues, although compared to leavers, persisters seemed to have a lower frequency of academic alerts and low motivation issues and a higher frequency of other issues.