6 Common Reasons for Student Drop Outs & 1 Simple Solution

Firstly, every university experiences early year student drop outs and they happen for a variety of reasons. So if you're experiencing this, you're not alone! 

On the other hand, every university has efforts to address student-drop outs because each student dropping out is $ out of the university because of tuition and marketing efforts.

Here are the 6 most common reasons of student drop outs:

1. Family issues such as homesickness and high expectations.
2. Friend issues such as belonging, not finding the right community, peer pressure, and roommate issues.
3. Financial issues on their loans and spending during school years.
4. Academic issues with not understanding how their major would lead to a career.
5. Mental health issues with stress, anxiety.
6. Physical issues with eating habits and sleep.

Luckily there's a solution - and there's something you can right now!

A student peer mentoring program is proven to increase student retention by 25% and here are the steps to launch one:

• First, we need to check if there a specific background, gender, race that's experiencing the dropout. Also, if there's a specific college/school that's experiencing student drop outs.

• These will be the best candidates for a peer mentoring program.

• Then, we can launch the program by bringing in the freshmen (mentees) and bringing in the sophomores/juniors/seniors (mentors) with an email invite.

• First step is creating the right mentor-mentee matches based on first-gen, race, gender, academics, challenges, and hobbies.

• Making the introduction for the students to get acquainted.

• Make sure to draw out expectations and activities for them to do. This is a part of mentor-mentee training.

• Follow up with the relationships and check-ins to track which relationships are working and if they're covering the 6 most common areas for dropping out. We need students to discuss these topics and peer mentors should be warning university staff if they realize a student mentee is getting close to dropping out - so that university staff can interfere at the right time with the right student.

If this looks like a lot to you - there are software that can help with all of these steps and make the programs more structured, automated and trackable: Demo Qooper Peer Mentoring Software

In addition there are solutions for online communities, university resources, built-in chat and video call functionalities (most importantly on mobile apps because freshmen don't check emails) - acting as a hub for freshmen to find peer mentors, communities in the universities, resources to use and events to attend.

Increasing student enrollment, academic development, engagement and retention by a minimum of 25%. The question for you will be which students do you want to be involved in the program. Once we know the population, the solution is set to launch in as little as 1 week.

You can launch this program for first-gen, international, minority groups and other target populations.

Here is 1 of Stevens Institute of Technology's Peer Mentoring Programs: Stevens MP2 Program