ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates the process of student withdrawal by turning to the students’ own experiences as recounted to us in postal questionnaires and personal interviews. It examines the reasons they gave for withdrawal, their study experiences with the OU and their future educational plans. The provisional registration period gives new students a chance to sample the OU teaching system without incurring the full cost of first year tuition and summer school fees. Withdrawal from the Open University can take place at any time during the year. Building on research experience, it was decided to ask students first, in an open-ended question, what their main reason for withdrawing from the OU was, and then to follow this with a set of prompted categories to discover what other factors were also involved. The results from the questionnaire did not enable us to conclude that the younger students withdrew for one particular reason whereas the older students did so for some other reason.
