The purpose of this study was to investigate factors influencing the academic persistence of adult learners based on a case of an open university in Korea. In order to successfully discover and accurately examine the effects of students’persistence, we considered differentiated group-level effects within a nested data. Using data collected from an open university in Korea, we applied the Hierarchical Generalized Linear Model, which treats individuals (level-1 units) as nested with in department level (level-2 units). To this end, we tried to predict group-level effects on academic persistence of adult learners. We especially focused on identifying observed department-level effects in our predictive models. The results of the study suggested that both individual-level and department-level covariates show statistically significant effects on student academic persistence. In particular,we discovered that department-level effects such as the offline attendance system evaluation and the online learning system satisfaction in an online learning environment can significantly contribute to students’ persistence in the open university contexts.