STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION ABOUT LEAVING THE UNIVERSITY IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN MEXICO

The problem of student attrition from colleges and universities has been extensively studied by scholars and practitioners alike; but this important subject remains unsolved for most universities in Mexico. In general, ANUIES (Mexican National Association of Universities and Higher Education Institutions) estimates that this problem is around 50% in Mexico; meaning that half of the students that begin higher education, don´t finish their studies in public or private universities. Recently, the dean of the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), Narro Robles declared that the amount of young people that either don’t work or study are around seven million in the country; thus this social and security problem will increase in an early future.
In 1975, Tinto published his enduring Student Integration Model of attrition. This model included measures of a student’s initial goal for their education and their institutional commitments, others researchers have proposed models for student retention including different perspectives (Donoso y Schieflbein, 2007) but each university has different characteristics that have to be identified in order to deal with the problem.
The National System of Technological Higher Education (SNEST) in Mexico, is an organization that depends of the Minister of Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública – SEP) related to higher education that offer programs on engineering and business. The SNEST attends around 400,000 students in 250 locations all over the country (www.dgest.gob.mx). It can be said, that SNEST is the major engineering university in Mexico; but on the other hand, the attrition program presents major challenges due to the nature and difficulty of basic sciences (math, physics and chemistry) related to engineering education, the management problems of such a complex organization, the funding needed to manage the whole System, etc.
The purpose of this paper is to identify the elements of the attrition problem in the SNEST from the perspective of the students, using Tinto’s model. To address this problem, we selected two institutions out of the 250 locations: Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya (ITC) and Instituto Tecnológico de Nuevo León (ITNL), which are located in two different states in Mexico. We conducted five focus groups with different categories of students (high achievers, students in trouble or about to drop, and dropped ones); therefore an analysis of the text derived from the focus groups was analyzed to obtain information about the problem. Major results indicate that one of the issues that have to be solved is the organizational variable but also do interactional and psychological categories; these results are going to be used by the directives of the SNEST to address the attrition problem and increase retention standards of students.