Pathways of adult student-workers in higher education: explaining the risks of early dropout, late dropout and graduation

Abstract

In Portugal, student-workers represent 8.5% of higher education students. They are mainly adults with a less favourable socioeconomic and professional background that return to school while working and after experiencing some years in the labour market so as to find a new profession or a job promotion. However, due to their particular characteristics and time restrictions, adult student-workers observe high dropout rates, justifying the need of identifying their determinants of dropout and graduation risks in a separate way. With this purpose, we match five sources to obtain a unique five-year longitudinal dataset with extensive information on individual, degree and employment variables of 976 student-workers from Leiria Polytechnic Institute, Portugal. We then use event history analysis, with competing risks, to investigate if and when the event of dropping out or graduation occurs and how a set of covariates affects the risk of each event. In addition, we distinguish between those that drop out with few accumulated credits (labelled as early dropouts) and those that drop out despite having a significant number of credits completed (late dropouts). We found that early dropouts depend more on academic failure, school-residence distance, personal motivation and employment variables, while late dropouts are more influenced by other factors such as marital status and degree characteristics. Among policy recommendations, beyond the frequently referred actions to reduce academic failure, we highlight the adoption of measures to avoid stopout behaviour, the adequate definition of the schedule and composition of classes (daytime classes and higher proportions of student-workers in the classroom, and with distinct academic performance, seem to reduce dropout risk), and the curriculum appreciation at the admission moment (some employment variables seem to contribute to increase the probability of graduation while others seem to contribute to enhance the risk of dropout), including criteria for regional preference and personal motivation.