There must be some way out of here? Inclination to drop out of university students in Germany from 1985 to 2016.

Usually, university drop-out has been studied from the perspective of academic failure, specifically a failure of students to integrate academically and socially to university (Tinto's model). Previous research has mainly supported this model but has also revealed that drop-out rates vary remarkably across fields of study, study programs, and universities. This paper takes a different starting point: it illuminates how the inclination to drop out have developed over three decades (1985-2016) and whether student-body composition affects the overall reported tendency to drop-out. Based on pooled cross-sectional data from the Konstanz Student Survey (KSS) with over 80,000 respondents in 24 universities, the paper tests factors such as gender, parental education, motivation and high school diploma grades. The inclination to drop out slightly decrease over decades while the changing composition of the student body explains around one third of this reduction. While BA/MA reform does not seem to contribute to the reduction of drop-out, the paper discusses potential changes to the matching process of students to study programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]