Institutions of higher education are placing an increasing emphasis on student retention programs for administrative, economic, and humanistic reasons. Decline in college enrollments is a major concern of these institutions. In attempting to explain attrition, Vincent Tinto (1975, 1987) developed a theory of student departure which stated that leaving college can be viewed as a process of interactions between the individual student and the academic and social environment of the college and that, other things being equal, the greater the extent of academic and social integration of the student into the college community, the more likely the student is to persist to graduation
