Failure to graduate from high school presents a serious problem to society reaching far beyond the education sphere. However, some high school non-graduates return to post-secondary institutions and successfully complete degrees, diplomas, and other credentials. Unfortunately, little is known about such individuals. Research on K-12 non-graduates tends to focus on retention within the K-12 system examining factors such as race, socioeconomic status, and the structures and organization of schooling. Regrettably little if any consideration is given to the future educational experiences and achievements of the K-12 non-graduates that return to post-secondary studies consequently creating a gap in the literature. This study examines administrative and achievement data of individuals who have not graduated from the British Columbia (BC) K-12 educational system and later re-entered the BC public post-secondary system. Specifically, this study identifies the percentage of non-graduates who go on to post-secondary studies and examines the year over year enrollment data for trends, the commonalities in the types of K-12 courses taken and associated achievement levels, the types of post-secondary programs selected, and concludes with a brief exploration of potential predictors, such as gender, home language, and previous academic performance. Overall the research findings on the study population provided some interesting results in terms of the proportions, composition, K-12 academic achievements, and program pursuit within the post-secondary system. Most notably was the proportions of non-graduates entering into post-secondary studies remaining stable over time, the K-12 academic achievements were average and did not include many at the higher end of the achievement spectrum, all attended a college, institute, or teaching-intensive university and not a research-intensive university, and there was a fairly even distribution across the programs that the study population opted to enroll in at their respective post-secondary institutions.

The purpose of this study was to test a conceptual model for assessing the effects of student aid on community college student persistence. A sample consisting of all students who had entered a public community college during the 1980 fall term was drawn from the database of High School and Beyond, 1980 Senior Cohort. Omitting transfer students brought the sample size to 1,364 students. The model of student persistence was based on Tinto's theory of student integration and prior research that suggested student aid may be related to the persistence of community college students. Persistence was defined as the number of terms of enrollment over a two year period (1980-81 and 1981-82). Receipt of aid was associated with lower socioeconomic status, higher tuition charges, above average high school grades, and an ethnic background other than Asian or non-Hispanic white. Aid recipients considered college costs and the availability of aid more important factors in their college choice. A model of student persistence composed of eight exogenous and five endogenous variables was tested through path analysis. It was found that the receipt of student aid did not have significant effects on any of the subsequent variables in the model. Estimation of a reduced path model omitting the aid variable did not result in a significant reduction in explained variance. Degree goals, initial expectation regarding higher education, encouragement to attend college, academic integration, and full-time work were the most important influences on persistence. These findings validated the importance of some of the major constructs in the theory of student integration, but they did not support the research hypothesis that student aid recipients would have a higher rate of persistence than nonrecipients when other factors were held constant. Since encouragement from significant others had a strong and positive association with student persistence, it was suggested that future research consider the role of encouragement on persistence. / Ph. D.