Proceedings of the 22nd International Academic Conference, Lisbon

STUDENT DROPOUT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN APPLICATION OF HAZARD FUNCTIONS

MAJA MIHALJEVIC KOSOR

Abstract:

Hazard functions are a part of survival analysis which is a branch of statistics dealing with failure in mechanical systems and death in biological organisms e.g. lifetime or reliability of machine components, survival times of patients in clinical trials. Here, the interest is focused on a group of individuals, for which there is a defined point event, often referred to as failure, arising after a length of time, referred to as the failure time. To gain more insight into student dropout we examine the application of hazard functions in higher education. In such a model, the probability is investigated that the student will complete/leave a degree in a given year conditional on him/her having ‘survived’ the programme up to that point. This may allow a wider analysis as it captures both students who have and have not completed their studies and examines the impact of selected variables for the duration of student’s higher education course.

Keywords: hazard functions, student droput, duration analysis

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2016.022.037

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