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OTTAWA, December 13, 2010  —  New reports released today by the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project show that female college students have greater retention rates than their male counterparts. The three new research briefs are based on the new Longitudinal Survey of Low-Income Students (L-SLIS), for which just over 10,000 government student aid recipients in their first year of post-secondary education (PSE) were interviewed in 2006 and then followed through 2009. “One implication of these findings is that males’ disadvantages in ‘accessing’ PSE, which are increasingly being recognized to be of potential concern, actually understate the differences in actual PSE attainment that we are likely to see” says lead author Professor Ross Finnie of the University of Ottawa.

The first of the three briefs focuses on gender differences. It shows that among college students, 25.2 percent of males leave in their first or second year without graduating, while only 21.5 percent of females leave. But there are other important gender differences as well. “Academically and financially, males and females show different patterns in their preparations for PSE,” says Professor Finnie, “In our sample of financial aid recipients, we find females make their decision to attend PSE earlier than males, enter PSE with higher overall grades, but are less likely to have savings for education." The study also found females significantly more likely than males to claim role models at home or at school.

“Females are consistently more likely than males to be concerned about their debts,” note the authors. “They are more likely than males to be concerned about the time it will take to repay their debts, their ability to actually pay their debts, the effect of their debts on their credit ratings and having sufficient funds to complete PSE.” Why this is and the implications for behaviour during or after PSE are questions remaining to be addressed.

The second brief compares students according to the size of the community in which they last attended high school. The authors found that students from urban communities (with populations greater than 100,000) are less likely than others to leave PSE, while students from medium sized communities (with populations between 10,000 and 100,000) are the most likely to leave. Rural students fall somewhere in between these groups in terms of their drop-out rates. The researchers also found that urban students are more likely than others to live at home with their parents while in first year of PSE and more likely to plan on living with their parents until they can pay back some or all of their debt. These students also spend the most time commuting to and from school. However, this does not appear to take away from hours spent studying; urban students spend comparatively more hours per week studying, as well.

The final report delves into the experiences of Aboriginal PSE students and shows that they are more likely than others to drop out, despite having overwhelmingly positive attitudes towards their studies. While the sample of Aboriginal students is very small, these findings do point to where future research should head.

All three briefs are authored by Ross Finnie, a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and Stephen Childs and Andrew Wismer of the MESA Project. Kelli Korducki and Miriam Kramer of the Canadian Education Project contributed to the gender brief and the Aboriginal paper, respectively. 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. Additional reports will be published in the coming months.

The research briefs, Gender and Post-Secondary Education, Large Urban, Small Urban and Rural Students and Aboriginals in Post-Secondary Education, as well as a general guide to the L-SLIS data, are all available online at www.mesa-project.org.