The Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid project, today released a set of four working papers focussing on the issue of student retention. The key findings are that the problem of student retention at a system level is much less severe than previously thought, that higher tuition and student finances have a relatively small effect on retention and that evaluating the effects of student loans is a complex problem.

"These papers provide important new evidence on post-secondary pathways and the financial factors that affect them in Canada," said Dr. Ross Finnie one of the paper's authors and Research Director of the MESA Project. "These findings require the policy community to take a new look at how we view retention issues in higher education and what needs to be done from a policy perspective."

In the first paper, Dr. Ross Finnie (University of Ottawa) and Ms. Theresa Qiu (the MESA Project) explore the Statistics Canada Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) to provide a national-level analysis of persistence in post-secondary education in Canada from an individual student's entry into their first PSE program. While only about half of all students graduate from their initial program within five years of starting post-secondary education, total persistence rates after five years are 82 percent at the college level and nearly 90 percent for university students. Different from previous studies, Finnie and Qiu are able to follow individuals as they leave and return to PSE as well as explore the reasons for students switching programs or institutions - or dropping out - according to individual characteristics, family background, high school outcomes and early PSE experiences. One notable finding is that financial barriers seem to have a relatively small role to play in these dynamics. Policy implications are discussed.

In the second paper, Dr. Felice Martinello (Brock University) focuses on the experiences of students who switch programs, examining the characteristics of switchers and their prospects of success after switching. He finds that while most switchers changed to another program within the same institution type (i.e. they went from one college program to another), in fact it was those who switched their institution types (i.e. move from college to university or vice-versa) who were more likely to complete their second degree. He also found that having parents with higher levels of education did not increase the likelihood of finishing one's first choice program, though it did increase the likelihood that a student would switch programs rather than drop out altogether.

The two final papers explore the impacts of student finances on retention. Dr. David Johnson (Wilfred Laurier University) looks at youths' decisions to persist in post-secondary education through the variation in annual increases in and the absolute values of tuition costs by province. He finds that changes in tuition appear to have negligible effects on persistence and concludes that neither the absolute amount of tuition nor increases in tuition have had a statistically significant effect on persistence. Dr. Kathleen Day (University of Ottawa) examines the relationship between loan funding and persistence from a number of different perspectives, and finds contradictory results with respect to persistence. Her paper is especially important from a research perspective as it underlines the serious conceptual and empirical challenges for any future attempts to look at the effectiveness of student loans, which has too often been viewed in a too-simple perspective and been characterised by relatively naïve empirical approaches.

Further information on these papers, along with previously released publications of the MESA Project, are available on the MESA website.

Background information on the MESA project

The Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid Project (the "MESA" Project) , is a research effort being conducted through the Educational Policy Institute and the School for Policy Studies at Queen's University on behalf of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. It was designed to focus on low-income students in post-secondary education and answer the following four questions:

• After graduating from high school, teenagers coming from low-income backgrounds face a choice as to attend college or university, or not. For those who did attend, how do they compare to those who did not?
• Does providing more funding in a student's first few years of further education attract more low-income students to post-secondary education?
• Does providing more funding in a student's first few years of further education make it more likely for low-income students to stay in and graduate?
• Are low-income students different across Canada?

MESA is a unique project in post-secondary education in Canada through its focus on generating a body of new high-quality empirical research using a range of approaches with the explicit purpose of shedding new light on policy issues related to access to and persistence in PSE and to communicating its findings to the broader research and policy community in an accessible format.

One line of MESA's activities has been to solicit papers from some of the leading Canadian researchers in the field of post-secondary education, and charge them with exploiting previously under-utilised Statistics Canada databases that are well-suited to doing research in these areas. These papers not only provide valuable new evidence on access and persistence, but also lay the groundwork for future research in these areas by helping to identify the remaining issues of greatest importance, posing the research questions in the most appropriate way and identifying the methods that could be used to address these issues.

In addition to this groundbreaking research, MESA has also created a new set of longitudinal data which follows low-income bursary recipients in Canada over a three-year period. The analysis of these data is currently underway.