Date of Award

5-27-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Educational Leadership

First Advisor

Gregory Barrett

Abstract

Federal need based financial aid receipt and remedial course load were the central foci of an integrated model designed to predict six-year bachelor's degree attainment. Data represented 2004/09 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:04/09) respondents who graduated from high school in 2003 and enrolled the same year as full time bachelor's degree seekers in four-year public and private institutions. Only those who designated "student" as primary role, specified English as first language, and were classified as dependents were included in the sample. Student background and precollege academic attributes, college experiences, including remediation, financial factors, incorporating federal need based aid, and institutional characteristics were entered directly into a binary logistic regression model to forecast bachelor's degree completion. Goodness-of-fit tests indicated that while the full model relative to the null model was a better fit to the data, the fit was unimpressive. Distinguishing non-degree attaining students within a group of peers who completed bachelor's degrees was especially problematic. For the primary areas of interest, knowing whether a student received need-based federal financial aid did not improve the ability to predict bachelor's degree attainment. Knowing whether a student took three or more remedial courses was helpful as a matter of statistical significance, but less so than other indicators. Data related to high school GPA and college enrollment patterns of fulltime/part-time status, stopouts, and number of institutions attended added the most value to the predictive capacity of the model. Family income and father's education level contributed slightly. The financial and academic preparedness aspects of student success have been addressed separately in the postsecondary literature, but the study investigated an important evidence gap by examining these two critical needs together. Finding that financial aid receipt and remedial course load were not opposing forces for the student profile of this study established a baseline for extending this line of inquiry with national data for other groups and institutional investigations of populations in context.

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