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This exploratory paper proposes a probabilistic approach to investigating college student attrition. Through the use of attributable risk, the top risk factors for attrition are identified and ranked. Then the issue of confounding risk between two risk factors is addressed by the means of relative attributable risk. Though it is only illustrated by the eight-year attrition data collected at a private institution, the proposed technique is comparatively simple for institutional researchers to test on their own data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a statistical method to deal with multivariate ordinal polytomous data. The gamma coefficient developed by Goodman and Kruskal is extended to a partial measure of association in the framework of the log-linear model probability model. Then, this method is applied to Sewell and Armer's data on educational aspirations of high school students in order to reexamine the validity of their conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]