Predicting Freshman Persistence and Voluntary Dropout Decisions from a Theoretical Model
In their comprehensive reviews of the literature on the college dropout both Spady [17] and Tinto [23] argue that much of the current lack of understanding of the college dropout process is due to the fact that the research emphasis has been descriptive rather than theorybased. In short, the vast majority of studies have searched for student or institutional variables significantly related to dropout behavior with no conceptual model to guide or focus inquiry. As a result there appears to be a wealth of statistically reliable, ex post facto associations that offer a markedly unparsimonious explanation of the dropout process [9, 14, 17, 23]. In an attempt to bring some coherence to the research as well as providing a conceptual framework to guide future inquiry, Tinto [23] has built on Spady's [17, 18] work to develop an explanatory, predictive model of the dropout process which has at its core the concepts of academic and social integration in the institution. The model is longitudinal and regards persistence or dropout behavior primarily as a function of the quality of a student's interactions with the academic and social systems of the college. The model asserts that students come to a particular institution with a range of background characteristics (e.g., sex, race, academic ability, secondary school performance, family social status) and goal commitments (e.g., highest degree expected, importance of graduating from college). These background characteristics and goal commitments influ-