STUDENT ABSENTEEISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION: THE CASE OF THE FACULTY OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS AT THE UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA

In recent years, the interest in absenteeism in university classrooms has increased sharply. An absent student is considered as one who, despite being enrolled does not attend class.

Absenteeism is a negative phenomenon because it conflicts with the basic premises of the EHEA model regarding the students’ role, such as autonomous learning, commitment and responsibility in the management of their learning process. Moreover, the presence of the student in the classroom is a requirement for the training in skills process. Additionally, this phenomenon causes other negative derivatives, for instance it involves a waste of economic resources, already scarce in the public university system, which could be very useful for the correct training of some other students.

Previous studies have attempted to identify the main causes of absenteeism among the university students. Health problems, problems in the relationship between teacher-student or student-student, lack of interest towards the learning process, difficulty in meeting academic requirements, among others, have been highlighted as the main reasons. However, although it is a very common and habitual problem, there are few studies that analyse this phenomenon in itself.

The aim of the present work is to identify and analyse the variables that the students themselves point out as those that most influence absenteeism in the university classrooms of the Faculty of Economics and Business at the Universitat de Barcelona.

Data were collected during the spring of 2017, with a sample of 1,896 students from the Business Administration, Economics and Sociology degrees at the Universitat de Barcelona. A questionnaire supported by the bibliography was used, obtaining a Cronbach's alpha of 0.70 and statistically significant for the T-square test of Hotelling and the test of Tukey's additivity. Students were asked to select, out of 18 potential motives, those that explained best the behaviour of their absentee companions, answering the question "in your opinion why your classmates do not attend class?"

The applied factor analysis reveals the existence of four dimensions or constructs that explain absenteeism at university classrooms. At the same time, through a cluster analysis and a discriminant analysis, different profiles of students have been obtained explaining the individual reasons for absenteeism.

The work contributes to know what the causes of university absenteeism are, and to apply strategies that guide students correctly from the very beginning of their studies, to avoid this problem. Educational actions are proposed to solve absenteeism at university classrooms according to each cause.