THE DROPOUT RATES IN THE FIRST YEAR OF HIGHER EDUCATION AS A QUALITY INDICATOR OF THE UNIVERSITY DEGREES. STUDY ON THE CATALAN PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES

University degrees are subject to the processes of monitoring and accreditation of their quality in the EHEA framework. To carry out these processes, different accreditation agencies have designed various indicators for each of the established dimensions. Within the dimension of "Global data and indicators", there is an item that refers to the abandonment rate, and in fact this indicator is used as a sign of University quality according to all accreditation agencies (Yorke, 1998; Corominas, 2001).

Students entering the University face every year a very broad degrees offer map, both heterogeneous and often with little discrimination among them. This situation makes it difficult for students to decide what degree they should study. In Catalonia, the final supply for the 2016-17 course amounted up to 691 different degrees and/or different universities. In front of such a big supply, pre-college students have had to decide their future educational and professional career. There are very vocational degrees and some others with very clear training objectives. However, there is a large majority of degrees that do not cause a clear vocation among their potential students or whose training and career goals can lead to important questions when making the selection. Consequently, in these cases, there is an increasingly frequent phenomenon, which consists on dropping out the initiated degree in order to move to another one -“change of degree” or “change of studies”.

By joining these two circumstances, a complex situation and difficult to deal with arises. The university degrees are accredited (or not) taking into account the dropout rate, but this indicator rather than a quality indicator may be related to students’ reorientation of their educational carrier.

The aim of this communication is to describe, through both academic and social variables, this partial abandonment and change of degree, in order to check if the abandonment during the first year rather than a quality indicator is an indicator of reorientation of studies.

A statistical analysis will be undertaken on the students that have re-entered university. The database will be obtained from the reports and statistics of the University pre-registration Office, referring to the Catalan public universities for the year 2016-17. In particular the analysis will focus on those students who entered university with already initiated studies at the university, and therefore they may be considered as students who have dropped out another (or some others) degree(s). In particular, the study population consists on those students who have returned to the University pre-registration system after having initiated (and not having finalized) another degree (students entering through access ways 7 and 8). Specifically, the study population will consist of 6.105 students (12.5% of students who conducted the University pre-registration for that year). They came from some other University studies, not meaning a low academic performance or poor quality of the qualifications. Therefore, at the end of the paper, the accuracy of using the dropout rate as a quality indicator will be reconsidered, in view that to a large extent it can be explained by exogenous factors rather than by the quality of the University.