Resilience and Academic Dropout in Ecuadorian University Students during COVID-19

Abstract

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has had a global impact that has affected all areas of people’s lives. However, people have different capacities to adapt and cope with the adversities and traumatic events that may have occurred during the pandemic with different levels of resilience. One collective affected by this global crisis was university students, who had to face an unprecedented academic situation, resulting in some abandoning their studies. This study aims to analyse whether the resilience of the students could be related to academic dropout. To carry out this research, we assessed the resilience of 1676 university students from 11 universities in Ecuador. To do so, a committee of experts from the Ecuadorian Association of Social Work Education Centres and 11 Ecuadorian universities designed a questionnaire and sent it to the entire sample. Subsequently, we compared the levels of resilience between university students who withdrew from university during the COVID-19 pandemic with those who continued their studies by using a multivariate analysis. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences in all variables analysed. The students who obtained the highest scores were those who continued their studies, and those students who dropped out obtained the lowest scores. In summary, we found that school dropout among Ecuadorian university students during the COVID-19 pandemic was due to low levels of resilience. Therefore, increasing student resilience could improve university retention rates and, in turn, academic performance and future life prospects.

Mental distress, food insecurity and university student dropout during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: evidence from South Africa

“…These findings are aligned with work from South America which found that 38% of students reported economic distress (related to food insecurity risk) as a key motive to dropout early in the pandemic, while dropout motives related to mental distress increased over time reaching 40% in 2021 ( 1 ). There is also evidence linking poor family resources as well as an inability to cope with low resilience, and ultimately heighted risk for dropout, further corroborating the findings from the current study ( 51 ).…”

Ongoing effects of pandemic-imposed learning disruption on student attitudes

“…In such an environment, self-organization and communication skills of the students become increasingly important [14]. Also, understanding the logical structure of physics requires resilience which many students may have lacked in the stressful environment created by the pandemic [38,39].…”

First-Year Engineering Student Persistence Amidst COVID-19 Interruptions: Evidence from Two Diverse Institutions

“…Specifically, the engineering persistence issue has been exacerbated further by the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020 due to the impact of structural barriers and inequities. For instance, the pandemic abruptly affected students' decision to leave their engineering major, which aggravated students' interpersonal problems, family resources, sociocultural resources, and coping strategies (Kang, 2021;Pertegal-Felices et al, 2022). Furthermore, studies have documented several issues disrupted the online engineering education in which half of the students experienced lack of engagement in online class and difficulties in maintaining their focus during online sessions (Alexa et al, 2022;Asgari et al, 2021;Ghasem & Ghannam, 2021).…”