Harmes, Harold M.

Shrinking enrollments have affected many small private and public colleges, causing administrators of these institutions to acknowledge the necessity of retaining enrolled students until graduation. Research reported in the literature supports the value of early identification of potential dropouts for designing and implementing effective intervention strategies. Although the majority of retention studies have been based on student demographic characteristics, Tinto (1975) developed an explanatory predictive model that considers persistence and dropout behaviors as consequences of the quality of a student's interaction with the academic and social systems of an institution. Pascarella and Terenzini (1980), two retention researchers, designed a questionnaire based on the theoretical constructs of Tinto's model of attrition. This questionnaire was administered to freshman students at both a large, public institution and a large, private university with results that generally supported the construct and predictive validities of Tinto's model of college student attrition. The purpose of the current study is to test the predictive reliability and validity of the questionnaire developed by Pascarella and Terenzini (1980) in a third setting: this time at Palm Beach Atlantic College, a small, private college with religious affiliations in West Palm Beach, Florida.

As systems, schools receive inputs from their suprasystems and
produce output which is returned to the suprasystems. Criteria for
evaluating quality of output are best defined by the suprasystems
which receive the output. When school systems produce output which
meets suprasystem criteria, a state of concordance between the educational
subsystem and its suprasystems is achieved. However, the out-put of an educational system may not meet the expectations of its
suprasystems. Deductive analysis is the method used in this dissertation for
establishing proof of cyclic irrelevancy from the assumptions, definitions
and postulates widely accepted by scholars in the field of systems
theory. Corollaries which logically follow are also formulated. Based
upon the identification and description of cyclic irrelevancy and its
corollaries, a theoretical prescriptive model for interruption of cyclic
irrelevancy is described.