  Post-secondary education persistence is the likelihood of a student remaining
in post-secondary education. Although statistics show that post-secondary
persistence for deaf students has increased recently, there are still many
obstacles obstructing students from completing their post-secondary degree
goals. Therefore, increasing the persistence rate is crucial to increase
education and work goals for deaf students. In this work, we present an
agent-based model using NetLogo software for the persistence phenomena of deaf
students. We consider four non-cognitive factors: having clear goals, social
integration, social skills, and academic experience, which influence the
departure decision of deaf students. Progress and results of this work suggest
that agent-based modeling approaches promise to give better understanding of
what will increase persistence.
