| Students were much less likely to continue if they were taking non-ABE/ College Prep courses. In fact, of those taking non-ABE/ College Prep courses, only four in ten (40.3%) continued, whereas six in ten (61.6%) of those taking purely ABE/College Prep courses continued. Financial Assistance Students indicating at enrolment that they expected to receive financial assistance tended to be associated with longer programs. Approximately two-thirds (65.2%) of those expecting assistance continued, compared with less than half (46.3%) who did not expect assistance. The probability of continuing varied somewhat among the expected sources of funding. Those expecting funding from Canada Employment (either Unemployment Insurance or Full Sponsorship) (81.2% continued) and from Disability Pension (81.8% continued) had the highest chance of continuing. This was followed by Local Bands source (71.8%). Students expecting funding from the Ministry of Social Services and ABESAP were more likely to continue (67.9% and 66.7% did respectively), while 63.0% of those expecting funding from Aboriginal Affairs continued. Workers' Compensation Board, Scholarships/Bursaries/etc. and Other funding expectation made no difference to continuing or leaving. On the other hand, students obtaining funding from Canada Student Loan (n--29) were less likely to continue (28.8% did)., The association between actual funding and continuing was similar to that with the anticipated funding, with 56.8% of students receiving funding choosing to continue. With respect to the major funding sources over eight in ten (80.8%) with Canada Employment funding continued, while nearly six in ten with Ministry of Social Service funding (57.5%) or ABESAP (58.9%) continued. There was mild evidence (p=0.04) of differences between Continuers and Leavers in their perceptions of the adequacy of the funding they received. Over twothirds (68.8%) of those who considered their funding partially adequate continued; however only approximately half (54.5%) who considered their funding either adequate or inadequate continued. 3.5.4 Summary of Point of Entry association with Leavers and Continuers As mentioned in the Point of Entry (2.1.1) the age, gender, marital status and dependents demographic factors are all inter related. So it is natural to expect that while the composition of each factor is highly statistically different between Leavers and Continuers, it may be possible to differentiate between them by using just a few of these factors. In fact, age alone is sufficient to account for all the differences between Continuers and Leavers. The mirror bar graph below shows the Point of Entry profiles for the Leavers and Continuers. Angled shading is used to mark those variables that are individually different between the two groups. As described in the Statistical Appendix (§6.2) moderate differences are where test p-values are in the range 0.001+ to 0.01 and strong evidence of differences occurs with p-values in the range 0.0001 to 0.001. When these Point of Entry variables are taken as a group, in a similar manner to the demographic variables, the variables that are needed overall, to differentiate between the Leavers and Continuers turn out to be:
These variables which also provided strong individual evidence are marked with the dark shading corresponding to overall in the legend. In particular, the levels Advanced, Provincial and Other are significantly higher in the Leavers, while significantly more Leavers have course loads of 14 or less hours per week. Thus the main factors differentiating the Leavers and Continuers appear to be summarized in terms of their age, all the factors relating to their current courses, whether they are expecting finance and whether they are employed while studying. |
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