IOE experts Evgeniia Shmeleva and Isak Froumin have recently come up with a paper that analyzes factors that are primarily responsible for undergraduate churn in programs of computer science and engineering education. The research draws upon a massive sample of more than 4,000 STEM students at 34 universities across Russia. Using this study as the starting point, we have set out to further elaborate on the topic, with student attrition representing an ever-pressing challenge for the global university realm. It turns out there is a particularly strong link between the amount of academic capital one was able to build up by school completion (as expressed by the score on the K–11 Unified State Exam) and one’s odds of successfully making it through the university coursework.
