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University student dropout in Colombia: a typology of barriers, institutional shared responsibility, and a conceptual model of “soulless education” as a public policy challenge
Student dropout in higher education in Colombia is best understood as a multicausal and multilevel phenomenon, in which socioeconomic, academic, institutional, and personal determinants converge, with territorial and institutional variations. In this regard, the sys-tematic literature review reflected in this working paper on the phenomenon of student dropout in undergraduate academic programs identifies a broad set of studied causes and solutions and underscores the need to integrate actors and approaches so that strategies do not remain fragmented (Arias et al., 2024). At the structural level, multilevel evidence shows that regional and institutional inequalities are associated with dropout and that the phenomenon is not distributed homogeneously across institutions and fields of study (Barbosa-Camargo et al., 2021). In virtual education, the Colombian literature reports barriers particularly associated with geographic location (rurality), work and family obli-gations, and socioeconomic conditions (Guzmán Rincón et al., 2021), as well as specific risk factors for vulnerable groups in virtual higher education (Segovia-García et al., 2024).
This working paper proposes an operational and reusable typology for diagnosing and managing student persistence based on the analysis of four barriers or constraints: money, time, program–student fit, and personal factors. Its contribution does not lie in “inventing” new causes, but rather in organizing the evidence so that it becomes actionable and measurable. In particular, the typology is strengthened by findings on inequality and socioeconomic conditions (Barbosa-Camargo et al., 2021); patterns of participation and learning behavior as early signals of risk (Huang et al., 2023); institutional support and the use of student support services (Johnson et al., 2022); relational dimensions such as instructor care and engagement (Okwuduba et al., 2022); and learning analytics and data science approaches for early warning detection, explainability, and targeted interventions (Olaya et al., 2020; Mustofa et al., 2025; Vaarma & Li, 2024; Seo et al., 2024; Rabelo & Zárate, 2024). In addition, the paper retains the notion of “soulless education” as a critical metaphor and proposes its translation into observable dimensions (support, academic-social integration, relevance/fit, material support, and theory–practice linkage) through an agenda for empirical operationalization based on the analyzed corpus (De-Juan-Vigaray et al., 2024; Barbeau et al., 2025; Belando-Montoro et al., 2022).
