Rurality and Dropout in Virtual Higher Education Programmes in Colombia

Abstract

As part of the 2030 Agenda, higher education has been conceptualised as one of the ways to overcome the social disparities experienced in rural areas in Colombia. Thus, in concordance with the benefits of this level of education, the state has been designing public policies during the last few years, in order to facilitate access to undergraduate programmes to these populations, focusing mainly on the implementation of the virtual modality. In this context, it is recognised that access itself is not enough, but that continuance and timely graduation are required to materialise the benefits obtained along with a higher education degree; hence, dropout is a subject of interest for study, especially due to the high rates existing in the rural student population. Therefore, the event of dropout becomes an obstacle to social change and transformation in rural areas. Thus, this article aimed to identify which individual, institutional, academic and socio-economic characteristics influence rural student dropout in virtual undergraduate programmes in Colombia. For this purpose, an exploratory, quantitative and cross-sectional study was proposed, with a sample of 291 students to whom a student characterisation instrument and a classroom evaluation instrument were applied. With these data, it was proceeded to establish which of them had deserted, constituting the extraction of the sample of the study, which were 168. With the information, an exploratory factor analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis and descriptive statistics were used to establish which explanatory variables are involved in the dropout of this type of student. The results showed that the academic variables analysed do not have an impact on the event, while marital status (associated with family obligations), age, social stratum, work obligations, parents’ level of education and type of work, income and type of employment relationship of the student, and, finally, the number of people who depend on the family’s income do.

Dropout in Rural Higher Education: A Systematic Review

“…When referring to student dropout, multiple meanings have been developed both by the academic community and by state and social agents, which generates diverse points of view and an enrichment of the discussion around it (Kehm et al, 2019), in other words, these perceptions are not mutually exclusive. As Guzmán et al (2021) expressed it, the multiplicity of definitions derives from specific purposes of analysis, and they have the capacity to complement each other in order to give a broader view of dropping out. In relation with the wide variety of conceptual and operational definitions of this event, this article is based on the one given by the Alpha Guidance Project.…”

“…Consequently, its use allows the theoretical framework of student dropout to be understood from a holistic viewpoint, integrating the perspectives of the academic community, state and social agents. With this integration of perspectives, the study of dropout has been carried out from a multidisciplinary orientation in which the sociological, interactionist, organisational, psychological and economic approach are highlighted (Lázaro Alvarez et al, 2020), and have resulted in the analysis of variables intrinsic and extrinsic to the student, categorising them into four determinants: individual, socioeconomic, academic and institutional (Fonseca and García, 2016;Barragán and González, 2017;Donoso and Schiefelbein, 2021;Guzmán et al, 2021).…”

“…Based on this interdisciplinary orientation of the study of dropout and the categorisation of the explanatory variables into the four determinants, this article is linked to the conceptual model described in Figure 1, which has been widely used in previous research (e.g., Barragán and González, 2017;Klein, 2019;Radovan, 2019;Kemper et al, 2020;Vera et al, 2020;Guzmán et al, 2021) as well as in the development of public policies such as in the Colombian case (Ministry of National Education, 2009), because it is adaptive to the educational modality or type of student population, the new realities of the higher education context, as well as allowing the development of explanatory and predictive models of dropout in higher education (Guzmán et al, 2021).…”

“…In this sense, the materialisation of student dropout represents a damage to the resources made available by the State, since " (...) students who do not graduate on time (or at all) when they receive public funding consume valuable fiscal resources, which in many cases are not recoverable" (The World Bank, 2017, p. 14); and, on the other hand, dropout prevents the consolidation of the benefits of higher education by making it impossible to improve the average income of the population (Cristia and Pulido, 2020), increase the productivity of the economy (Cristia and Pulido, 2020), consolidate democratic processes (Lance, 2011) and reduce crime (Chalfin and Deza, 2019). In brief, student dropout in higher education can slow down the development and social transformation sought by implementing public policies related to access to higher education, hence the importance of its prevention and mitigation (Guzmán et al, 2021).…”

“…Thus, the aim of this article was to identify the individual, socioeconomic, academic, and institutional explanatory variables involved in student dropout in rural populations, based on a synthesis of the evidence available in the SCOPUS database. Hence, student dropout in rural higher education merits a comprehensive view of the explanatory variables which affect it, in order to move towards its prevention and mitigation by the various actors in the tertiary education subsystem, especially the State and HEIs (Gibbs, 1998;Byun et al, 2012;Guzmán et al, 2021;Snyder and Dillow, 2021). To guide the systematised review presented here, the following research questions were proposed: RQ1: What trends have been followed in the study of student dropout in rural higher education in terms of the characteristics of publications and methodologies?…”