Colleges Ontario

Low-income students who get tutoring, study tips, plus $750 per term, found less likely to drop out

Louise Brown
EDUCATION REPORTER

Toronto Star
April 29, 2009

Giving at-risk students extra help – plus $750 a term in cash – can reduce the staggering 35-per-cent dropout rate in Ontario's community colleges, new research shows.

The study is believed to be the first time the controversial trend of paying kids to stay in school – being tested at high schools from Toronto, Ottawa and Kitchener to Winnipeg, Washington, D.C., and England – has been offered at the post-secondary level.

"Retaining students is a real problem in post-secondary education, so if we find a small financial reward provides an incentive, it could benefit the whole of society," said Rick Miner, president of Seneca College, which co-sponsored the study of 1,700 students with Mohawk College in Hamilton and Confederation College in Thunder Bay.

The $6 million study, co-sponsored by the non-profit Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, showed that at-risk students who got free tutors and study tips and a $750 bonus for using this help earned higher marks and were less likely to drop out.

The improvement was most dramatic among those from families earning less than $25,000 a year, whose dropout rate plunged 18 per cent after receiving money and mentoring.

"It's not just the money, although that did help me avoid having to take out a student loan – it helped with commuting from Brampton and also for textbooks," said Seneca student Christine Da Rocha, graduating next month in early childhood education.

"But when you start at college, you don't even know where to look for help, so it was nice to have somebody to go and talk to who knows everything. I became a peer mentor myself in my second year."

The study tracked the progress of three groups of students facing demographic challenges, from poverty and language gaps to weak high school marks and fuzzy career focus.

One group was assigned a staff person to encourage them and steer them to study workshops; another group also received $750 per semester if they took advantage of the help; and the third group got neither.

Among the findings:

The 45 per cent dropout rate for low-income students fell to 35 per cent for students who got the weekly mentoring, and 27 per cent for those who also got the money.

The average mark of about 60 per cent for low-income students rose about 2 percentage points for students who got the weekly mentoring, and about 5 points for those who also got the money.

While some 16 per cent of low-income students were asked to leave college because of poor grades, that fell to a scant 2 per cent for those who got counselling and money.

The overall dropout rate among at-risk students who got both money and counselling fell by just over 6 percentage points.

"I was an at-risk student – I repeated Grade 12, my high school grades were never good and I had no idea what I wanted to do at college," said Alexandria West, a general arts student at Mohawk College in the study group that got weekly help, but no money.

"But having all that support – even just someone to show me how to sign up online for free tutoring – made such a difference, I'm now earning 90s," she said, "and I'm heading to York University next year for psychology."