In-Depth Examination of Student Attrition in Higher Education Through Decision Tree, Random Forest, and XGBoost Algorithms

Customer Customer churn, a critical metric for businesses reliant on customer loyalty, involves the loss of customers from a company. This study examines churn among college and university students, leading to financial losses, decreased accreditation, and diminished reputations for educational institutions, ultimately reducing their appeal to prospective students. To identify factors contributing to student churn and classify students as likely to churn or not, this research utilizes Decision Tree, Random Forest, and XGBoost algorithms. These classification algorithms, with XGBoost and Random Forest enhancing Decision Trees through boosting and bagging techniques, respectively, are well-suited for the task. The data was sourced from the Academic Information Bureau and processed before model development. The model with the best performance will predict student churn on new, unseen data. Findings indicate varying performance metrics for each model, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The XGBoost model excelled, achieving an accuracy of 98%, precision of 99%, recall of 96%, and an F1-score of 97%, significantly improving over the base Decision Tree model across all metrics. Notably, all models showed better performance in predicting the majority class (not churn) compared to the minority class (churn).