Dropout in Rural Higher Education: A Systematic Review

Student dropout in higher education has been of great interest to the academic community, state and social actors over the last three decades, due to the various effects that this event has on the student, the family, higher education institutions, and the state itself. It is recognised that dropout at this level of education is extremely complex due to its multi-causality which is expressed in the existing relationship in its explanatory variables associated with the students, their socioeconomic and academic conditions, as well as the characteristics of the educational institutions. Thus, the aim of this article was to identify the individual, socioeconomic, academic, and institutional explanatory variables involved in student dropout in rural populations, based on a synthesis of the evidence available in the SCOPUS database. In order to achieve it, a mixed systematic review was defined under the PRISMA 2020 method. The analysis was approached in two stages; the first concerned the identification of the documents and the conformation of the sample, where 21 documents were distinguished for effectively dealing with dropout in rural higher education; and the second corresponded to the procedures defined for the development of the bibliometric analysis and synthesis of the information found in the documents. The results showed the distribution of studies by country, years of publication, the categorisation of the documents in SCOPUS, their classification by type and the methodologies used in the development of the studies analysed, as well as the variables that have been addressed in previous research. In this way, it is concluded that the results of the studies are not generalisable, either because of the size of the sample or because of the marked social asymmetries that exist in some countries, which can make the findings lack significance; on the other hand, the interest in research on variables associated with individual and academic determinants to explain rural student dropout is highlighted. In addition, some future research lines which can be addressed as a complement to the current view of the dropout event in rural higher education were identified.