University Student Dropout Prediction Using Pretrained Language Models

Predicting student dropout from universities is an imperative but challenging task. Numerous data-driven approaches that utilize both student demographic information (e.g., gender, nationality, and high school graduation year) and academic information (e.g., GPA, participation in activities, and course evaluations) have shown meaningful results. Recently, pretrained language models have achieved very successful results in understanding the tasks associated with structured data as well as textual data. In this paper, we propose a novel student dropout prediction framework based on demographic and academic information, using a pretrained language model to capture the relationship between different forms of information. To this end, we first formulate both types of information in natural language form. We then recast the student dropout prediction task as a natural language inference (NLI) task. Finally, we fine-tune the pretrained language models to predict student dropout. In particular, we further enhance the model using a continuous hypothesis. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective for the freshmen dropout prediction task. The proposed method exhibits significant improvements of as much as 9.00% in terms of F1-score compared with state-of-the-art techniques.