Dropouts and its Reasons in a Community Campus: A Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

This study has predominantly explored the primary challenges associated with dropout rates in higher education institutions. Furthermore, this research paper seeks to analyze the dropout rates within bachelor's degree programs at Myagdi Multiple Campus (MMC) and delve into the underlying causes for these dropouts. Among the four primary factors contributing to the dropout rate under investigation in this study, the personal-related factor is identified as the most influential when compared to the remaining factors. It has explored a variety of reasons of the dropout: illness and diseases, the late admission, the admission for the students' leadership elections, the lack of programs for interaction with parents, parental socio economic status, the lack of quality teachers, the lack of transportation facilities, not getting an opportunity to study desired subject, migration and the attraction towards foreign employment as the best job market. The objective of this study is to identify the reasons of dropout in bachelor level at a community campus and attempt to recommend the positive feedback to the concerned authority for the purpose of decreasing the dropout rate. This study has employed interpretivism as the research paradigm, phenomenology as research design and narrative inquiry as research method. The theories that I have employed the dominant motivational theories in this study: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Tinto’s model. I have selected forty dropout students of MMC through non-random judgement sampling. For the purpose, I have applied Google forms to collect forty participants' opinions; and the phone calls for the interview with seven participants as the tools for collecting the required data for the designated study. The implication of this study is to develop higher education policy for controlling the dropout's rate of the community campuses. Moreover, this study has been employed in order to improve the existing condition and help to enroll the numbers of students who are being intended to be under the dropout zone as expected by the researcher. Similarly, this study will probably foster the researchers, who keenly desire to continue the researches in this field. The most significant thing of this research is that the common and dominant dropout rate of community campus is personal reason i.e. low economic status, early marriage, internal migration and cultural barriers that tend to be fifty seven point five percentage as followed this research.