Exploring Risk of Delay in Academic Trajectories in Two Undergraduate Programs

Delay in completing degree programs is an important problem in higher education. This work explores delay in two engineering programs using a novel representation of trajectories summarizing the term-by-term students’
risk of delay
associated with different aspects such as performance, workload, and difficulty of courses. Representation of term-by-term delay risk allows grouping and finding similar delay trajectories. By examining profiles of delay trajectories in the two engineering programs and separately for students who completed and dropped the program, we found patterns of delay risk that researchers or stakeholders can trace to uncover triggering factors. The model and analysis presented in this work contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of delay and could help to inform curricular adaptations and re-design, and even more efficient higher education policies.