Factors related to the persistence of nontraditional female students at an urban commuter university

The purpose of this study was to identify those variables which best accounted for persistence among nontraditional female undergraduates at an urban commuter university. Nontraditional was defined as those students 24 years of age or older who attended a commuter university, either full- or part-time. The sample included 150 females, enrolled in the spring 1990 semester as first-time enrollees in the academic year 1989-1990. Persistence was measured by reenrollment of the subjects in the fall 1990 semester. There were two phases to the research design. The first and quantitative phase, conducted at the beginning of the spring 1990 semester, used discriminant analysis to explore the relationship of six sets of student variables to the subjects\u27 persistence. The variable sets included: student background information, environmental variables, academic variables, educational commitment, personality traits (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) and critical thinking skills (Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal). The second, qualitative phase, featured in-depth interviews with ten randomly selected subjects from the sample of 150 in fall 1990 after reenrollment had been determined: five of the interviewed subjects were persisters and five were nonpersisters. Stepwise discriminant analysis was used on the quantitative data, and the analysis determined that the linear combination of variables which best discriminated between persisters and nonpersisters included GPA, college hours completed, and current hours enrolled and in that order of importance. Using these three variables, 68% of the cases could be correctly classified by the discriminant function. In-depth interview results reflected emergent themes indicating persisters showed more specificity of educational goal, more spousal support, and a stronger sense of commitment to their education. Nonpersisters appeared to lack that specific focus on an educational goal and were more apt to be involved in life events which they perceived as prohibitive to reenrollment. Both persisters and nonpersisters discussed the difficulty of getting in the university system