Attendance, retention, and funding: A community college case study in Mississippi

The purpose of this study was to determine if a relationship existed between student traits represented by data currently stored in a Mississippi community college's administrative software system and a student's propensity to miss class excessively. A basic literature review showed that both students and their college benefit when students attend class properly. Both Gump (2004a) and Thatcher, Fridjhon, and Cockcroft (2007) reported that a strong correlation existed between attendance and academic success. In order to follow up on nonattendance, an institution must know who is and is not attending (Bowen, Price, Lloyd, & Thomas, 2005). This research project examined existing data held by the college in an effort to seek relationships between the data elements such as the students' age and poor class attendance.The subjects were community college students age 17 and up from the Mississippi community college used as the sample in this study. They attended credit classes during the fall 2008 semester. The approximate sample size was 10,000 credit students.The study did find statistically significant relationships between some of the independent variables and excessive absences. Further evaluation of the standardized residuals from the Chi-Square test statistics revealed combinations for variables that contributed to the rejection of five of the seven null hypotheses. The relationships discovered between data fields and excessive absences point to areas for future research of a student's propensity to miss an excessive amount of class.