Student attrition in higher education: an exploratory study of factors influencing student retention at a tertiary English language centre in Saudi Arabia

Student retention is one of the most confronting issues in tertiary education. Low student retention rates reflect negatively on the image of the institution and possibly on its academic reputation. This in turn might affect the institution financially and affect future academic plans for development. This study is an exploration of the phenomenon of low student retention rates in an English language centre of a tertiary institution in Saudi Arabia. The aim was to investigate the factors affecting student retention and those to which non-persister students responded when making the decision to leave the sample college. The study also aimed to investigate the role of the institutional experience and whether there was a relation to students’ academic ability in the English language. The adopted research design was sequential exploratory mixed methods with greater emphasis on the qualitative phase. The study consisted of an initial qualitative phase and subsequent quantitative phase. Student data were collected during the academic year of 2012–2013 through interviews, focus groups, surveys and questionnaires for the quantitative data. The participants of the qualitative phase were four non-persister students (interviews), 15 persister students (focus groups), 10 academic and administrative staff (surveys) and 163 students who participated in the quantitative study questionnaires. The college records indicated that 53 of the sample students withdrew by the end of the first year of the program. The thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed that the main sources of student attrition were the students’ poor institutional experience and satisfaction, particularly with the college administrative system; the poor level of their institutional commitment; and the high level of their educational and employment goals.<br> These findings were tested quantitatively through a modified version of the Institutional Integration Scales (IIS) designed by Pascarella and Terenzini (1980) to check whether the qualitative data could be generalised to the larger population of the sample college. The statistical analyses of the questionnaires confirmed that the non-persister students were significantly different from their persister counterparts in regard to many of the tested variables. They had significantly higher high school grades, higher levels of life and work commitment, lower levels of institutional commitment and lower levels of institutional integration according to their overall scores on the IIS. Moreover, the conclusion of the study suggested that the main motivator behind non-persister students withdrawing from the sample college was the availability to them of another study or job opportunity. No evidence was found to associate the student attrition phenomenon in the sample college with students’ low academic ability, especially in the English language.<br>