Student Dropout in Technical-Professional Higher Education: Exploring factors that influence freshmen students

Abstract

Research on university desertion in Chile, in the last decade more attention has been paid to this area. In this sense, the studies carried out respond to the construction of conceptual models (Himmel, 2002) and the evaluation of the associated costs to this phenomenon (González & Uribe, 2005). However, over the years, research has been generated to define predictive models that allow us to recognize which factors explain the dropout of higher education (Villa & Barriga, 2010; Mizala, 2011). Although an advance has been made, the context of inquiry has been mainly the university, while in professional institutes the focus has been on describing quantitatively the state of the situation. It is because of the above, that this work aims to determine the variables that significantly explain the dropout of students in vocational-technical higher education in the 2014-2016 cohort. To fulfill this purpose, the research is framed in a positivist paradigm, using quantitative tools, in the context of a cross-sectional study with an explanatory scope whose design is non-expe­rimental. For data collection and analysis purposes, a sample of 1876 freshman students from an accredited technical-professional institute was selected, where the data obtained were processed using the statistical software R, implementing a generalized linear model with error binomial distribution and Logit link function. In this process, a total of eight variables were considered that would explain the desertion, according to the specialized literature. The results allow an approximation to the factors that have a greater impact on dropout, namely, gender of the student, year of high school graduation and school hours of the professional training, according to the level of statistical significance of each variable.