Undergraduate Dropout in Colombia: A Systematic Literature Review of Causes and Solutions

Higher education dropout rates in Colombia are the second highest in Latin-America. Almost 50% of students who start an undergraduate program in Colombia drop out. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review that surveys publications related to university dropout in Colombia between 2000 and 2021. This review followed the Kitchenham guidelines. Databases such as Publindex, Scielo, Wos, Scopus were reviewed. To create cause and solution taxonomies, we identified causes and/or solutions reported by researchers in each revised article. Each cause/solution was then grouped using the university dropout taxonomy proposed by Castaño. 107 papers, 66 different causes, and 62 proposed solutions related to university dropout were reported in the papers analyzed. The results suggest there is an increasing interest in understanding (i) the undergraduate dropout phenomenon, and (ii) the use of data science to solve the problem. These studies also evince a lack of integration between stakeholders for developing crosscutting solutions. The information related to some of the reported solutions is not sufficiently developed to enable a better classification, or they lacked information on implementation, results, or impact. This makes it difficult to make progress with designing new strategies based on previous studies.