| The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the defining and background variables (i.e. age, enrollment status, educational goals, high school performance, ethnicity, and gender), academic variables (i.e. study habits, academic advising, absenteeism, major certainty, and course availability), environmental variables (i.e. finances, hours of employment, outside encouragement, and family responsibility) and the intent to persist of adult learners enrolled in a nontraditional accelerated adult postsecondary undergraduate cohort degree program. Bean and Metzner's (1985) Conceptual Model of Nontraditional Undergraduate Student Attrition was used to guide the study and the validated Nontraditional Student Attrition Questionnaire developed by Metzner (1983) was the instrument used to gather the data. The research findings presented in this study suggest that defining and background variables (i.e. ethnicity), academic variables (i.e. academic advising and major certainty), and environmental variables (i.e. financial capacity and encouragement coming from close family members) can affect the adult learners' intent to persist in accelerated undergraduate cohort-based degree programs. |
