Partnership and Higher Education: Do a Partner’s Educational Aspirations Influence a Student’s Dropout Intention?

Abstract

In almost all OECD countries, a significant proportion of students drop out of their studies and, despite a long tradition of research, the influence of a partnership has hardly been analyzed in this context. This paper examines whether the expectations and demands (the realistic and idealistic aspirations) of the partner influence the student’s dropout intention. In a first step, relationships are investigated on the basis of a pooled data set. The results clearly show that there is a negative correlation such that when the partner has higher realistic aspirations the student is less likely to have high dropout intentions. In a second step, possible dynamics associated with the course of studies are considered. By means of fixed-effects regressions it can be shown that when the partner’s realistic aspirations increase, the dropout intention decreases. This effect proves to be stable. With regard to idealistic aspirations, however, none of the models show negative effects. The analysis shows that the partner is important for the course of studies and should also be considered.