Date of Conferral

4-30-2024

Date of Award

April 2024

Degree

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

School

Education

Advisor

Sarah Inkpen

Abstract

The problem that was addressed through this study is the declining student degree completion rate for a public state baccalaureate institution in a northwestern state over the six-year period of 2014 to 2020. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if completion of an undergraduate degree within six years could be predicted by the number of advising sessions a student had during degree completion. A student retention model created by Amara Atif, Deborah Richards, & Ayse Bilgin and NACADA’s academic advising core competencies model served as the framework, where student-institutional interactions through best practices in academic counseling can promote degree completion. Deidentified archival data for 937 full-time, first-time college students with no prior college credits at Northwest University (NU, a pseudonym) were retrieved. A logistic regression model (χ2(1) = 11.459, p < 0.001) showed that for an increase of one academic appointment at NU’s academic advising center, the odds that a student would complete within six years increased by 22.8% (OR = 1.228, 95% CI [1.089, 1.385]. The study resulted in a white paper proposing recommendations for improvements in academic center advising at NU by requiring students to have academic advising sessions each term, gathering data to explore why students may not be visiting the academic advising center, and to gather additional data to explore the effectiveness of the center. The findings from this study can promote change to policy and academic advising practice to increase college completion rates. Positive social change is achieved when students at NU benefit from timely baccalaureate degree completion within six years, allowing them to transform their communities and local industry through future employment.

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