Is Job Shadowing a Panacea for Educational Drop Outs?

Chopra, Ashok; Menon, Satish

A major concern that is griping the world over is the rise in the number of educational dropouts. This has resulted in impacting society, institutions, Government, and Students themselves. This paper investigates the issues relating to dropouts and also looks at how the pieces of evidence are co-related. It is observed through the findings of a research work carried out in USA and UAE (Sample of eighty five students at each location using multi variate tests analysis) that students without a strategic perspective as well as a non-commitment to education end up having a very poor academic performance. This has a knock-on impact, not only in terms of completion success rates but also demonstrating a high risk of discontinuing or abandoning the degree. Therefore academic performance along with the aspect of practical/experiential learning is a key variable in getting the students to decide their future course of action, which is either to stay or drop out. This paper has adopted a three steps approach in its methodology to identify factors leading to high educational dropouts. They being, student-oriented factors, institution oriented factors, family-oriented factors, community, and social media-oriented factors. Articles were examined based on open coding content analysis to further assess the quality of the facts and data provided. The study does finally extend to how practical approaches like job shadowing could be considered to reduce the dropout rates at every level by understanding the benefits it has to offer.