Dropping out from Higher Education in Germany an Empirical Evaluation of Determinants for Bachelor Students

Abstract

Withdrawing from university is a complex decision-making process, during which several conditions and problems from different areas of life and study accumulate and affect each other. This study is based on the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), which includes a wide range of information on study course and students’ characteristics, and aims at providing an encompassing analysis of determinants influencing students’ dropout decision. Determinants can be categorized into demographic and family background, the financial situation of students, their prior education, institutional determinants, as well as motivation and satisfaction with study. Both, a bivariate analysis, as well as a logistic regression model with LASSO regularization identify many important determinants already known before or at the beginning of the study, such as prior education and satisfaction related variables, allowing early identification of at-risk students and the implementation of prevention programs.

Keywords

• feature selection
• dropout prediction
• logistic regression
• evaluation methods