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OTTAWA, September 28, 2010  —  Three new research briefs released today by the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project show that policies aimed at increasing post-secondary education student retention may be targeting the wrong people.  All three studies are based on data from the new Longitudinal Survey of Low-Income Students (L-SLIS), for which more than 10,000 low-income students across Canada were interviewed annually over a three-year period covering the school years between 2006 and 2009.

“Policy makers have been creating programs based on what seems to reduce drop-out rates in other countries like the United States,” says Ross Finnie, lead author and professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. “Now, with the L-SLIS, and also using the wealth of institutional data available at Canadian colleges and universities, we can start to craft policies which do a better job at helping those students who are most at risk.”

The first brief delves into the experiences of “first generation post-secondary education (PSE) students” (i.e. those whose parents did not themselves attend college or university) and reports that such individuals are, surprisingly, at no greater risk of leaving PSE than others.  Based on these results, the authors question current retention programs that target first generation PSE students.

The second brief looks at the age at which low-income students said they decided to attend post-secondary education, and finds that “almost one half of these students had made their decision about whether to attend PSE before Grade Nine.”  Late deciders are much more likely than early deciders to leave without graduating, which strongly suggests a need for early interventions if policy makers wish to affect the outcomes of under-represented populations.

The final brief explores measures of academic engagement and students’ attitudes toward their studies in first year, which turn out to be significantly better predictors of students leaving PSE than a student’s first generation PSE status.  In particular, students who say they are less interested in what they are learning, or who do not identify with their program, are at much higher risk of dropping out.  “Policy makers could do a much better job of targeting at-risk students using these indicators,” states Professor Finnie.

All three briefs are authored by Ross Finnie, Stephen Childs and Andrew Wismer of the MESA Project. The L-SLIS was an initiative of the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project, a long-run research undertaking funded by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation to evaluate the impact of CMSF Access Bursaries and to explore the relationship between finances, access and persistence in PSE. Further briefs will be released in the next weeks, and additional reports will be published in the coming months.

The research briefs, When Did You Decide, First Generation Post-Secondary Education Students and

Engagement, Attitudes and Support Networks, as well as a general guide to the L-SLIS data, are allavailable online at www.mesa-project.org. [External site.]