The Hidden Timeline for Marginalized Student Groups: Drop and Withdrawal Outcomes in General Chemistry

With high attrition rates nationwide, general chemistry is often regarded as a gatekeeper course for students pursuing STEM degrees. Students that do not finish general chemistry successfully, or do not finish at all, are much less likely to continue with their degree and enter the STEM workforce. Female, first-generation, low-income, and racial/ethnic minority students are more likely to experience these undesirable outcomes, leading to their disproportionate under representation in the STEM workforce. This study explores how the aforementioned groups of students differ in their patterns of dropping and withdrawing from a general chemistry course using an institutional data set. Deidentified records for all 5699 students who took the course between 2017 and 2023 were analyzed with Kaplan–Meier curves and restricted mean survival time. It was found that female, first-generation, and low-income students eventually persisted at lower rates throughout the course than their male, continuing-generation, and nonlow-income counterparts. Interestingly, these differences in persistence emerged late in the course around the withdrawal deadline, approximately three-fourths of the way through the course. Findings for race and ethnicity were more nuanced, with Black and Hispanic students having the lowest rates of persistence and nearly identical patterns of withdrawal; for these students, a divergence in persistence compared to other racial/ethnic groups emerged well before the withdrawal deadline at about halfway through the course. Overall, these findings demonstrate that disparities in course persistence do not appear until at least halfway through the semester, suggesting a crucial window is available for targeted interventions aimed at mitigating disparities in outcomes in general chemistry.