Why "at-risk" students persist: Pierre Bourdeiu's theory applied to student retention at Humber College
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following study examines the factors that have contributed to the success of 'at-risk' students at Humber College in Toronto in the early 21 st Century. Although colleges and universities in Canada and the United States have instituted many initiatives to increase student retention, the retention rate has remained consistent at 60%-65% for decades. This study utilizes the theory of Pierre Bourdieu to provide a broad approach to understanding and increasing student retention. In particular, Bourdieu's 3 major concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and field are applied as Bourdieu intended: in context and multi dimensionally. Quantitative analysis yielded 146 students who started in full time programs at Humber in September, 2001 and who were identified as being 'at-risk' based upon their final high school average. Interviews were conducted with 17 of these students to discuss which factors resulted in their academic success. This qualitative data indicated that these individuals had extensive cultural capital, positive habitus, and responded to the explicit and implicit demands of the field. Their limited performance in high school was a choice, as was their decision to activate their cultural capital in community college. Conclusions from this study support the applicability of Bourdieu to students at a 21 st Century community college and the importance of incorporating all 3 of his variables in research. As well, academic integration was identified as more significant for success at community college than conventional social integration. Recommendations are offered to colleges regarding increasing student retention and the changing nature of faculty interaction with students. The study concludes with presentation of topics for future research with respect to students who are visible minorities, the impact of gender on graduation, faculty engagement, and a more nuanced perspective on social engagement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".