According to a news item posted in the October 5th Korea Daily, "almost 1 out of 2 Korean-American students attending America's top universities drop out." This news arose from a doctoral dissertation by Samuel S. Kim, presented at Columbia University in late September. His dissertation was based upon a longitudinal study (a study that tracks a group of individuals over a relatively lengthy period of time) of 1400 Korean students enrolled at 14 universities (all the Ivies, Amherst, Duke, Stanford, Georgetown, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis) between 1985 and 2007.