Comparison of urban and rural dropout rates of distance students (original) (raw)

South Africa has one of the highest university dropout rates in the world. As a country, it also has a history of forced location and the withholding of resources, including quality education, from certain rural areas. This study investigates, the effect of urbanisation (of the area in which a student resides) on the dropout rate of distance students in an introductory taxation course. Using Kember’s longitudinal-process model of dropout from distance education as a point of departure and interrogating the “characteristics” of students, it was found that the effect of urbanisation on its own only accounted for a 1% higher dropout rate for rural students over their urban peers. When urbanisation, as a variable, was combined with other demographic variables, the outcomes were sometimes unexpected. Ten multi-variable comparisons indicated that rural students always represented the students who dropped out the most. However, in four of these multi-variable comparisons, rural students we...