<![CDATA[Student attrition presents a major challenge in higher education due to its direct impact on academic quality and institutional graduation rates. Detecting students who are likely to withdraw at an early stage is therefore essential to ensure that timely interventions can be made. This study investigates how three distinct feature selection techniques—Chi-Square, Information Gain, and ANOVA—affect the performance of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) in classifying student outcomes. The data used in the experiment were drawn from academic and administrative records, which had been standardized through Min-Max normalization. The results demonstrate that each method contributes positively, with classification accuracies ranging from 88.71% to 91.37%. Information Gain emerged as the most effective approach, yielding the highest accuracy at 91.37% and a recall score of 97.29%, largely due to its capability to reduce entropy and isolate the most informative variables. ANOVA also performed consistently well with 90.82% accuracy, while Chi-Square was comparatively less effective, potentially due to its reliance on categorical variables that may not capture predictive nuances. These findings emphasize the strategic importance of applying robust feature selection to improve ANN-based prediction models. Ultimately, this research supports the design of data-driven systems aimed at reducing student dropout rates and strengthening academic retention strategies across higher education institutions.]]>
