Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition by Vincent Tinto (review)

Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition by Vincent Tinto holds the stature as a fundamental text of the college student experience. Such a stature springs from two primary sources. The first source pertains to the importance of the problem of college student departure to understanding the college student experience. A window on the academic and social experiences of college students springs forth from an understanding of college student departure (Braxton, Sullivan, & Johnson, 1997). Moreover, students who depart from college fail to experience growth and development in the ways that transpire because of college attendance as documented in How College Affects Students (Volume 3): 21st Century Evidence That Higher Education Works (2016) by Matthew J. Mayhew, Alyssa N. Rockenbach, Nicholas A. Bowman, Tricia A. Seifert, and Gregory C. Wolniak with Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini.

The other source emanates from the profound and pervasive influence of this fundamental text on both the scholarly and practice communities that hold an interest in the problem of college student departure.

DESCRIPTION OF THE VOLUME

The 1993 publication of Leaving College stands as a second edition to the edition published in 1987 by The University of Chicago Press. In his review published by The Journal of Higher Education, John P. Bean stated: “This book appears to be the best compilation of ideas about understanding student departure from college written to date” (1988, p. 708). Bean noted that the purpose of this book centers on the revision of Tinto’s 1975 model published in The Review of Educational Research to more fully account for the longitudinal process of student departure. Bean also stated that this book was intended to assist institutional leaders in the use of the revised model of student departure to guide institutional practices to increase student retention and to steer future research on student departure.

This book has made some noteworthy contributions, such as Tinto’s contention that scholars and practitioners should use the word departure rather than drop out to characterize students who leave their initial college or university of enrollment (Bean, 1988). Bean noted that Tinto views departure as an interaction between the individual student and their institution. Another contribution is Tinto’s extension of van Gennep’s (1960) stages of...