Inequalidades e disparidades associadas à intenção de evadir no ensino superior em população racialmente/etnicamente diversa de regiões de baixa renda

Abstract

Introduction: Dropping out of higher education is an international concern, with prevalence ranging from 28.2% (United Kingdom) to 84.4% (Chile), and is a complex outcome due to its multicausality, which is expressed in the relationship between its individual, economic and academic explanatory variables. In low-income regions, educational inequalities and socioeconomic disparities can aggravate the intention to drop out via academic variables. Objective: To investigate the relationships between socioeconomic inequalities and the intention to drop out of higher education in a racially and ethnically diverse population from low-income regions, and to examine whether academic factors mediate these relationships. Methodology: We studied a sample of 506 participants from the baseline phase of a larger multicenter longitudinal project 24-hour movement behavior and metabolic syndrome (24h-MESYN), approved by the Research Ethics Committee (CEP, opinion: 4.055.604 and 5.161.340). Our eligibility criteria were: students regularly enrolled in the first year of higher education, aged at least 17 and who signed the Informed Consent Form (ICF) or Free and Informed Assent Form (FIAF). Data was collected via an online questionnaire. We adopted the intention to drop out as the outcome. In the multilevel Poisson regression model, we adopted as exposures: i) age, biological sex, race/ethnicity and city of birth (inequalities); ii) maternal education, family income and professional student (disparities); iii) academic course, shift and semester; iv) preferred undergraduate course and hours of study per day (academic variables of interest). We used the center as the contextual variable and a significance level for retention in the model of 0.25. Then, we built mediation models via causal mediation analysis with the variables retained in the final multilevel model, adopting inequalities and disparities as exposures, and the academic variables of interest (p ≤ 0.05) as mediators. Results: The majority of the sample was female (70.5%) 65.0% of the participants were from a private institution, Of the total number of students, 68% study in their preferred course and almost 80% of the students dedicate between 2 and 5 hours per day of study to the course, such variables were shown to be associated with a lower intention to drop out. We found that students enrolled in their preferred undergraduate course (Prevalence Ratio [PR] 0.43; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.27-0.67) and who studied 4 hours a day (PR 0.26; 95% CI 0.11-0.61) were less likely to intend to drop out, even when adjusted for biological sex, race/ethnicity, city of residence and academic variables. And the mediation analysis in our study revealed that course preference mediated 22.0% of the association between race/ethnicity and intention to drop out. Conclusion: In the first year, course preference and time dedicated to daily studies emerge as protective factors against the intention to drop out among university students from diverse ethnic/racial backgrounds in low- income regions. In addition, course preference acts as a mediator in the relationship between race/ethnicity and intention to drop out.