An analysis and comparison of students in 3rd level education: Technical Report

This report documents the approach the researcher’s project will take in order to answer the question posed. The project aims to gather datasets on students and analyse them, in order to see what subset of students is entering 3rd level education and achieving greater success, in terms of dropout and graduation rates, in higher numbers. The two data subsets are secondary school leavers, 18-22 years old, and mature students, 23+ years old.

The document intends to help the reader understand what happened in the project and how the approach taken helped to complete different milestones.

December 2016 marked the mid-point of the project, a stage at which many of the techniques that were needed in order to dive further into the datasets, would only be taught in semester two starting February 2017.

May 2017 marked the completion of the project in its entirety; the following document summarising all of the steps that were taken throughout the duration of this project and the manner of its completion. Using a dataset provided by the National College of Ireland, this project was able to analyse and determine which subset of student was more successful in 3rd level education from historical data (2007-2015), and furthermore, to predict the average age of a dropout student in 10 years’ time.