Abstract:

The study carried out with 12th grade students in ten districts of Mozambique and an equal number of schools sought to identify the reasons that led these students not to pursue higher education after completing that level and / or equivalent. Similar studies have been carried out in other countries; we were concerned with the perception of the phenomenon in the Mozambican context.

In each study district, a school, and then a class, was selected at random. In these districts, there were collaborators to administer the questionnaires and return them with answers. In this study, collaborators are designated as the subjects who carried out the fieldwork. Its integration in the study was due to the researcher's difficulty in being present in these districts, given the country's size, logistics and time. The qualitative study is based on a descriptive paradigm.

For data collection, 500 self-administered questionnaires were distributed and 416 responses were obtained. Five interviews were also conducted with key informants by telephone with recording. For the analysis of the data from the questionnaires, the statistical software SPSS was used, and for the data of the interviews, the content analysis based on the phases proposed by Laurence Bardin. The results of the study indicate that at the origin of the phenomenon under study are motivations of a socioeconomic nature, namely: low household income and, consequently, weak purchasing power; poor school performance of students; weak exploitation of Information and Communication Technologies in an educational context, including cultural factors.
Part of the results obtained corroborate the conclusions of other studies that are the basis of the theoretical framework of the study.

Keywords:

Access to Higher Education, Higher Education costs, socioeconomic and cultural characteristics, Distance Education, Mozambique.