Patterns of University Withdrawal: Do Former Students’ Accounts Raise Social Justice Concerns?

Abstract This study examines university dropout by focusing not on students’ intentions but on those who have effectively discontinued their studies. Data were collected using an ad hoc questionnaire administered to a sample of 2183 former undergraduates from four Spanish public universities who dropped out between 2010 and 2020. The instrument combined sociodemographic and academic information with self-reported accounts of satisfaction, engagement, reported withdrawal-related circumstances, and decision-making processes. Principal component analysis reduced the variables to eleven dimensions, which were subsequently used in a two-step cluster analysis to identify distinct patterns within students’ retrospective accounts. Three interpretive profiles emerged. The first comprises disengaged and misaligned students, characterized by low satisfaction and engagement and by retrospective attributions related to institutional or program-level shortcomings. The second includes low-commitment and externally influenced students, who show uniformly low levels of engagement and whose withdrawal narratives appear weakly grounded in personal or academic motivations. The third profile encompasses constrained but committed students, who report high levels of satisfaction and engagement but retrospectively associate their withdrawal with external constraints such as economic pressures, work–study incompatibility, or family responsibilities. These findings illustrate how former students retrospectively interpret and organize their dropout experiences and underscore the importance of considering students’ own accounts of their academic trajectories. More specifically, the results suggest that a substantial proportion of withdrawal narratives are structured around constraints that participants perceive as being beyond their individual control, pointing to the potential relevance of equity-oriented support policies and institutional flexibility measures. Overall, the study contributes to a more differentiated and context-sensitive understanding of how former students reconstruct and make sense of dropout processes in higher education.