APPLICATION OF SURVIVAL ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES TO THE STUDY OF STUDENT DROPOUT IN A CIVIL ENGINEERING MAJOR

Abstract

A worrying issue in the Civil Engineering Major of the Faculty of Exact Sciences and Technology (FACET) of the National University of Tucumán (UNT) is that of student dropout. In the period from 2005 to 2019, a total of 900 students have dropped out of the degree, out of 1,615 entrants. Knowing their possible causes can allow us to generate improvement proposals to mitigate them. In the present work, statistical analysis techniques known as "Survival Analysis" have been applied, which are used to analyze the expected duration of time until one or more events occur, in this case dropout. Likewise, the covariates that influence dropout are analyzed and their effect is quantified. As a result, the average times that elapse until a student drops out have been calculated, as well as which are the subjects that increase the risk of dropping out when the student has not passed the course that qualifies them for the final exam.