Freshmen program withdrawal: types and recommendations

University program dropout is a problem that has important consequences not only
for the student that leaves but also for the institution in which the withdrawal occurs.
Therefore, higher education institutions must study the problem in greater depth to
establish appropriate prevention measures in the future. However, most research papers
currently focus primarily on the characteristics of students who leave university, rather
than on those who choose to pursue alternative courses of study and therefore fail
to take into account the different kinds of abandonment. The aim of this paper is to
identify the different types of dropout to define their characteristics and propose some
recommendations. Thus, an ex post facto study was carried out on a sample of 1,311
freshmen from a university in the north of Spain using data gathered using an ad-hoc
designed questionnaire, applied by telephone or an online survey, and completed with
data available in the university data warehouse. A descriptive analysis was performed to
characterize the sample and identify five different groups, including 1. Students persisting
in their initiated degree 2. Students who change of program (within the same university)
3. Students transferring to a different university 4. Students enrolling in non-higher-
education studies 5. Students that quit studying. Also, data mining techniques (decision
trees) were applied to classify the cases and generate predictive models to aid in the
design of differentiated intervention strategies for each of the corresponding groups.
Alfaguia Project was funded by the European Union (DCIALA/
2010/94). Additionally, our research team is granted by
the European Regional Development Funds (The European
Union and Principality of Asturias) in the frame of the
Science, Technology and Innovation Plan (GROUPIN14-100
and GROUPIN14-053). Also, Ph.D. students were granted:
ME was granted by the Spanish Ministry of Economy,
Industry and Competitiviness (BES-2015-072470), AC recibe
support of Asturias Regional Department of Education
and Culture (BP16014) and JC received funding from
the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology
(SFRH/BD/117902/2016).
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion