THESIS ABSTRACT

This thesis was conducted by Group 7 of BSN Sernior students batch 2010 at Manila
Adventist Colleges. The purpose of the study is to determine the reason/factors behind why a lot
of students dropped out among BSN students’ at MAC and to design an effective protocol that
may help reduce (if not completely eradicate) this problem in view of improving the overall
performance of the students. To explore the many angles to the situation, the researchers opted
to use survey questionnaires, as well as interviews, to obtain data which were subjected to
statistical treatment, analysis, and interpretation. A total of 70 survey questions were handed out
to the [70] respondents. The results of the study can be categorized into 4 major factors:
Environmental, Financial, Personal, and Academic. For environmental, the highest factor was:
no permanent, or lack of, classrooms, faulty facilities, too many distractions, and bullies; for
financial: too many school-related activities that require payment, and costly miscellaneous fees;
for personal: dislike for teachers, feeling that the teachers dislike them, they cannot relate to the
teaching strategy, and feeling that the teachers were not approachable; for academic: difficult
subject matter, unjust makeup for OVDs, and questionable computation of grades.
Of the 70 respondents, (57.1%) were females and (42.9%) were males. It also shows that
58.6% of the respondents belonged to 19-21 age bracket; 15.7 percent has an age of 18 and
below; 21.4 percent are ages 22 to 24; and 4.3 percent are ages 25 and above. For the Year Level
of the respondents, forty six percent (45.7%) were in the third year level, 44.3% are fourth year
students; nine percent (8.6%) are the second year students; and only 1.4% is a first year student.

The result of this study shows that according to the students surveyed, financial factors
with a mean of (2.2643) and a standard deviation of .93142 and personal factors with a mean
of (2.2000) and a standard deviation of .86770 have some influence on the reason for dropping
out. The other factors have little influence. We propose a Retention Protocol to at least
decrease the drop-out rate of Manila Adventist Colleges. There are several recommendations
including not forcing the students to pay their tuition fees before taking the exams, not
increasing tuition fees too much, abolish some school activities not related to the course to
lessen financial burden, adjusting teaching strategies and last but not least, more thorough
screening of students so that the school may be spared of accepting less than worthy students
and not compromise the school’s academic standards.