Identifying Factors Influencing Engineering Undergraduate Student Graduation in UP Diliman

Abstract

Understanding how different factors affect the performance of a student in the university setting is important in policy making and providing a better environment for learning. Existing studies on student graduation rates typically employ the use of statistical analyses to correlate a student’s profile and their chances of graduation. Building on the success of these methods for Western institutions, we used Logistic Regression together with other statistical metrics such as Wald’s χ2 Test and Odds Ratios to evaluate the contributing factors that may affect student graduation chances. The results show that the main factors affecting graduation include enrollment in the preferred degree, Math scores in the college admission test, high school academic performance, proximity to the university, and economic background. Finally, we also found that including post-matriculation factors in the model increased model performance significantly.

Keywords — logistic regression, engineering education, factor analysis, odds ratio, graduation