EVALUATION OF A PSYCHO-SOCIAL SUPPORT PROGRAM ABOUT CONCEPTS OF PERSISTENCE AND UNIVERSITY RETENTION

ABSTRACT The high number of students who fail their first year of higher education in Chile has led the Ministry of Education to create strategies of accompaniment, as a way to raise retention rates and prevent university dropouts. We sought to understand the meanings and scope of the persistence and university retention phenomenon, using a qualitative case study methodology (Stake, 1998) from a communicative-critical perspective (Gómez et al., 2006). Participants were freshmen (cohort 2015) belonging to the program “me quedo en la universidad” (“I stay in University”). Various positive and negative evaluations of the program are noted, highlighting aspects of participation, learning strategies, motivational factors and even elements such as space and identity that may come to be established with the university or with their career, which may influence the decision to continue or defect from the system.