Congratulations to HPSE PhD student Eduardo Santander!

Eduardo is a recipient of the Dean’s Grant for Student Research. His study aims at examining factors influencing first-year student credit accumulation at a flagship regional University in Chile. Classical frameworks of college freshman success and typical institutional benchmarks often neglect earned credits as a metric to gauge student attainment, concentrating instead solely on whether students remain enrolled from term to term rather than on their actual expected credit completion. However, while retention rates indicate continued enrollment, credit attainment gives a clearer picture of students' actual academic progress towards earning a postsecondary degree. High retention rates can often mask underlying academic progress issues. Leveraging a robust dataset tracking over 13,000 students across 6 pre-pandemic cohorts, multilevel regression modeling will identify drivers of credit completion ratios in the critical initial year. The analysis will compare the significance of academic preparation, demographics, first-year performance, and other dimensions relative to traditional retention predictors. Overall, by uncovering variables obstructing credit attainment, the study could inform policies spanning enrollment management, financial aid, academic programming, and student success initiatives aimed at facilitating first year progression, especially for learners coming from distressed backgrounds.