ssessing Situational Awareness of Universities Concerning Student Dropout: A Web-Based Content Analysis of Romanian Universities’ Agenda

• Main Authors: Adrian Hatos, Răzvan T. Coloja, Alina Sava
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University Babes-Bolyai 2020-12-01
• Series: Journal of Research in Higher Education
• Subjects: situational awareness; higher education agenda; web-based content analysis; student dropout
• Online Access: http://jrehe.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/index.php/2020-2/2020-issue-no-2-vol-iv/adrian-hatos-razvan-colojaalina-sava/adrian-hatos-razvan-t-coloja-alina-sava_art/

Universities have a strong internet presence where they publish large amounts of documents available for analysis. The relevance of these documents has been rarely put to scrutiny in a policy anlysis context. In our paper we use data from Romanian universities to achieve two objectives: 1) to assess the actual presence of the issue of student dropout at the level of universities' agenda in Romania as it is apparent in their web pages; 2) to evaluate the degree to which the agenda of Romanian universities reflects the actual issue of student retention as reflected in factual data. The results show a significant correlation between the presence of the topic in documents and the actual dropout rate, but there are some limitations, though: the correlation is not linear, universities seem to be inertial in their public aknowledgement of the problem, web-scrapping and web based content-analytic procedures still have numerous reliability issues.