Retenção de alunos no ensino superior em economia emergente: estudos múltiplos a partir das teorias seminais

Abstract

Dropping out of a Higher Education course is a phenomenon present in all markets. About half of the students around the world do not finish the courses. The retention of higher education students became part of the HEI’s strategic agenda. Although research on the subject has been important since Tinto’s seminal work written over four decades ago, the problem remains. Thus, this thesis aims to identify the influence of factors related to HEIs and factors related to students in the process of retaining students in higher education. For this, I propose three interdependent studies. Study I identifies, based on bibliometrics, current research and trends in studies on student retention in higher education. Study II analyzes the relationships of dropout factors from secondary data from the Higher Education Census through survival analysis (Cox's proportional hazard model). In Study III, I use a linear regression to identify factors that influence the retention of students in Brazilian HEIs. In the results of Study I, we identified and discussed three factors, namely: a) IES perspective - activities for retention; b) IES perspective - activities for student success and c) student persistence; still in this study we indicate a future research agenda in the following themes: Retention and the Context - IES and Cultural; Freshmen, Veterans and Others; Focus from the Student; Offer Typology. With the results of Study 2, we found that the white population evades less; women evade less; students in shorter courses drop out less, and finally we find that students in ODL courses are more likely to drop out. Regarding Study III, we identified that university stress negatively influences student retention; social integration positively influences student retention and, finally, the quality of academic services positively influences student retention.