FOI2017/142

The number of undergraduate student drop-outs from SOAS University London, for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year, from the years 2012-2017.

The requester has confirmed that they would like data on students leaving having failed exams included.

Data source:

Data was taken from the SOAS copy of HESAend of year submissions from 2012/13 – 2015/16. The 2016/17 data is based on an enrolment report dated 30-June, 2017 (20170630 ENSTATS 2016-17). These extracts used the parameters below to limit the population to 655 records.

As the HESA report does not always contain the student’s last year of programme enrolment (this is particularly the case with earlier/older data), a further step was taken to cross-reference the HESA list with a report of student enrolment records (ENSTATS 2011-2016) to provide the year of programmein which the student was last enrolled.However in earlier enrolment records (particularly 2012/13), this data was not collected as part of enrolment reports for students whose enrolment had lapsed.These records are marked as Unknown for year of programme.

Students enrolled in 2016/17 who may choose to not continue in 2017/18, but haven’t formally withdrawn to date cannot logically be included in the 2016/17 data. Consequently, the 2016/17 data should be considered as under-reporting the ultimate number of students who will not continue with their studies.

Parameters:

(i)Session

Data with sessions A12/13 to A16/17 (i.e. the 2012/13 academic year through to the 2016/17 academic year) wasincluded.

(ii)Student Enrolment Status

Students were selected from the HESA return who had an Instance End date, and reduced return due to non-progression, a dormant record, or withdrawal. For the 2016/17 data only withdrawals can be identified at this stage in the enrolment cycle.

(iii)Year of Programme

The year level of the programme (1,2,3 for Bachelors and 1,2,3,4 for Bachelors with a year abroad) has been used. Thus if a student has repeated year 1, so is attending their 2nd year at SOAS, they are still listed as year 1 in the data.

(iv)Method

Only undergraduate degree students were included.

(v)Headcount

Individual student records were considered regardless of student mode (whether full-time or part-time).

Rounding strategy

The data have been rounded using the same rounding methodology that is used by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). Their strategy is summarised below (sections on FTE and percentages not reproduced as not relevant):

Due to the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Human Rights Act 1998, HESA implements a strategy in published and released tabulations designed to prevent the disclosure of personal information about any individual. This strategy involves rounding all numbers to the nearest multiple of 5 and suppressing percentages and averages based on small populations.

HESA Services Standard Rounding Methodology:

  • 0, 1, 2 are rounded to 0
  • All other numbers are rounded to the nearest multiple of 5

Note that Totals are rounded separately, so the total will not always equal the sum of the row/column it represents.

Data – Headcount of discontinuing students by year of programme

Academic Year
Year of Programme / 2012/13 / 2013/14 / 2014/15 / 2015/16 / 2016/17
1 / 75 / 85 / 80 / 95 / 80
2 / 25 / 35 / 30 / 20 / 30
3 / 5 / 10 / 10 / 10 / 15
4 / 0 / 0 / 0 / 5 / 0
Unknown / 35 / 0 / 0 / 0 / 0
TOTAL / 145 / 130 / 125 / 130 / 125

SOAS, University of London

14 July 2017

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