Abstract

The Office of the Provost tasked Hanover Research to administer a Dropped Student Survey to assess why students chose to leave UH and to determine perceived strengths and areas for improvement. The survey was sent to 8,511 undergraduate and graduate students in the Spring of 2020. Students invited to participate were enrolled at UH during the 2017-18 or the 2018-19 academic years, had not graduated, and did not enroll during Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 semesters. Of the students invited to participate, 496 participated for a response rate of 5.8%. The survey consisted of a mix of selected response and open-ended questions.

In this project, I collected student demographic, academic, and administrative data that was sent to Hanover Research. Hanover created and administered the survey instrument. They also provided the survey analysis. I consolidated Hanover’s main findings in an internal report to the UH Provost and President.

My contributions include text analysis for open-ended survey responses. They are presented as word frequencies, direct quotes pulled to inform the frequencies, and word clouds. Open-ended questions gave more context to select questions. For example, participants were asked “Originally, what motivated you to enroll at UH?” and prompted to select among a list of reasons. The open-ended portion gave respondents a chance to give more detail.

As an internal project, I do not offer a link to this report. If you are interested in learning more about this project and my text analysis, please email me at jxm@uh.edu.