Conceptual challenges and evasion trends in higher education : the reality of a community univerty

Abstract

The number of enrollments in brazilian higher education has doubled in the last decade, however, statistics show that less than half of the students can complete the course in the regular term. Among the main causes for the low number of graduates is student dropout, a topic that has challenged many researchers. Aiming to understand how the phenomenon of evasion is configured in community institutions, a scenario not explored in research on avoidance in higher education, we conducted an exploratory research, supported, mainly in quantitativedata, about the entrance and exit of students, from 2005 to 2014 at a community university in the western region of Santa Catarina. Among the results obtained we highlight that: 1) there is no consensus about the concept of avoidance, in many cases this is associated with other situations such as student mobility. 2) In the institution surveyed, in 10 years, the number of exits (36,250) was higher than that of registered entries (25,506). 3) In general, the institution operates with 5 forms of exit or modalities of evasion: cancellation, cancellation, abandonment and internal and external transfers, in most of them, we verified that there was a decrease in the number of cases in the analyzed period, on average -56 %, except cancellations that showed an increase of 73%. Finally, we find that studying evasion in higher education allows us to understand its complexity and comprehensiveness in the different scenarios in which it is presented.