Application of the TETRAD II Program to the Study of Student Retention in U.S. Colleges

We applied TETRAD II, a causal discovery program developed in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Philosophy, to a database containing information on 204 U.S. colleges, collected by the US News and World Report magazine for the purpose of college ranking. Our analysis focuses on possible causes of low freshmen retention in U.S. colleges. TETRAD II finds a set of causal structures that are compatible with the data. One apparently robust finding is that student retention is directly related to the average test scores and high school class standing of the incoming freshmen. When test scores and class standing are controlled for, factors such as student faculty ratio, faculty salary, and university's educational expenses per student are all independent of both retention and graduation rates, and, therefore, do not seem to directly influence student retention. Furthermore, simple linear regression applied to test scores, class standing, and retention data showed that the t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Marek J. Druzdze, Clark Glymour
• Keywords: Class Standing, Data Mining, Freshmen Retention, KDD 1994, Test Scores