Factors associated with high first year undergraduate retention rates in business departments with non-traditional student intakes

Introduction Low rates of first year undergraduate retention represent a serious problem for many English universities, especially post-1992 institutions with high intakes of students from economically deprived areas (Clare, 2005; Lipsett, 2007, 2008; Swain, 2008). Thus, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA, 2008a, 2008b) the average first-year retention rate for post-1992 universities1 that in 2005/6 recruited more than 35% of their incoming domestic students from “lower socio-economic classes” (LSECs)2 was just 69.4%, compared with an average of 91.4% for United Kingdom universities as a whole (Attwood, 2008).