The university is considered the preeminent institution for higher education, producing students with the highest level of initial training in a population. It is consequently an institution of great importance with regard to the educational strategies proposed by the government.

Due to the importance of universities as institutions, different parameters are often reviewed in an attempt to control their development by assessing factors including the quality of the education provided, the students and the performance of teachers. Among the most significant pieces of data are the number of students who drop out or leave university studies and the reasons that lead students to dropout (Fernández-Mellizo, 2022).

This is a global problem that impacts Spain in particular as, according to Fernández-Mellizo (2022), 20% of students who start a degree program are affected. On the other hand, Álvarez (2021), notes that according to the National Institute of Statistics, the level of dropout in Spanish universities is decreasing every year, standing at 20.2% for men and 11.6% for women in 2020. In Andalusia, the average is slightly better than the Spanish average. Nevertheless, the percentage of students who drop out of university studies is still above 15%, with 27.5% dropping out of the degree they are pursuing, and 12.1% changing degree program (Ministerio de Universidades, 2021).

In recent times, the scientific literature has been focusing on school dropout at university level, mainly due to the low academic performance of students (Cerezo et al., 2015; Casanova et al., 2018). Furthermore, to avoid an increase in dropout rates, family support is important, and if this is not the case, educational institutions should strengthen students’ motivation for education (Sosu and Pheunpha, 2019). Also, some factors linked to school dropout are those nuanced in the study by Troelsen and Laursen (2014) who indicate how culture and economics affect education and school dropout.

In this line, there are several studies, which focus on the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on education and mainly on school dropout, which may affect the continuation of schooling and learning during and after the pandemic period (Joulaei and Kalateh-Sadati, 2020; Pertegal-Felices et al., 2022).

Similarly, the study carried out by Gómez-García et al. (2022) indicates that the outbreak of COVID-19 has influenced the mental health of university students, being this a factor that has been related to a decrease in their academic performance and given that the mental health of students is related to their academic performance, they determine that it has influenced an increase in university dropout, being necessary that the academic institutions themselves face measures that try to mitigate this negative influence.

The European Union is trying to develop new plans to engage its population to attend higher education, having as one of the main goals that the European Commission established in 2020 was that at least 40% of the population between 30 and 34 get a tertiary qualification (European Commission et al., 2015).

That situation has made a change all over the countries that are part of the European Union and, in the last 30 years, governments from around 180 countries have developed different actions to prevent the school dropout more precisely in higher education and working on different aspects concerning socio economic facts.

In that context, the university is considered the preeminent institution for higher education, producing students with the highest level of initial training in a population. It is consequently an institution of great importance with regard to the educational strategies proposed by the governments.

Furthermore, it is a bigger issue as the promotion of higher education is working, the percentage of the 20- to 24-year-olds are increasing in most of Europe. Focusing on the Spanish context, that percentage has increased from 29 to 43% according to the OECD (2017 data cited on Aina et al., 2018).

The University as an institution is complex to understand due to its multiple characteristics and its evolution over time. It was initially conceived as a center for the advancement of knowledge, where teaching and learning processes take place. With the passage of time, it became a research center seeking evidence-based knowledge, with a clear methodology, and its subsequent dissemination (Ruiz-Corbella and López-Gómez, 2019).

From this definition, the University is an essential institution supporting the progress of society. Accordingly, several values are used to define different parameters to evaluate the quality of these institutions. To this end, student grades, failure rates or the university dropout rate are considered (Clavijo-Cáceres and Balaguera-Rodríguez, 2020). One of the most important pieces of information when assessing the educational capacity of universities is the student dropout rate, as it provides a meaningful indication of the number of higher education students who proceed to complete their education (Fernández-Mellizo, 2022).

School dropout is an issue that has been worked on by different institutions due to the significant economic importance it has for countries. Among these institutions we can highlight the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank (Acevedo, 2020). This is a global problem that impacts Spain in particular as, according to Fernández-Mellizo (2022), 20% of students who start a degree program are affected. Based on Eurostat’s (2018) over 3 million young people in the European Union have started a tertiary qualification but they had discontinued their studies because of different facts.

University dropout is not easily explained since it depends on multiple variables and the relationships among them. The university, the faculty and the students, collectively, are the three agents highlighted in this process, providing many models that describe the institution:

These new perceptions of the university are based on a change of paradigm. Initially, the university was conceived as an elitist institution for those who had the financial resources and sought to advance their intellectual development. Accessibility to the university, as well as the diversity of the population that attends it, entails a change in the way the university is viewed as well as the work that should be carried out in it (Portal et al., 2022). Eurostat’s (2018), showed that the main reason to drop out of university is the desire to start working, followed by lack of interest in the chosen studies and their difficulty. Other point of view is showed up on the Spanish situation where although some studies cannot prove there is a relationship between the difficulty or the low academic performance (Roso-Bas et al., 2016).

This implies that university failure or dropout does not correspond to a single factor that explains all situations. University failure is a result of adaptation to the context, since the university is not an institution that focuses on the ability to learn but rather on the ability to seek and generate new knowledge, giving great importance to student autonomy. Thus, students with a more neutral character are more likely to have good results, as they do not require that personal connection with their teachers (Noriega and Arjona, 2011). Consequently, some of the definitions of school failure that have been put forward are obsolete in part or in their entirety.

School failure has been defined as “the situation in which the subject fails to achieve the normal goals for the degree of intelligence he/she possesses in such a way that his/her whole personality is compromised and altered, affecting his/her overall performance as a person and his/her healthy and effective adaptation to the type of life that surrounds him/her” (Ríos, 1973 cited in Pompa et al., 2003, p.82). This definition is noteworthy because it does not present the intellectual capacity of the student as a limitation but as an element that establishes the expected and the result obtained. However, the same definition speaks of the influence that failure has on the individual’s personality and also of how the student’s environment can be one of the causes leading to it.

Other definitions reduce school failure to the achievement of the objectives set “If the school context is adopted as a reference for school failure, it would be defined as the student’s inability to meet the objectives proposed, explicitly or not, by the school (Lara-García et al., 2014, p.72).” From this perspective, failure is seen as not achieving what is expected, but it does not consider that there are internal or external elements that influence this situation.

If the concept of the University and the definitions of failure have varied, what has changed the most are the factors that explain school failure, according to the results presented in Alonso and Lobato (2005), which can be classified as follows in Table 1.

Other authors have added further causes that arise from the interaction of the three main agents, including demotivation for the course, lack of prior knowledge and inadequate use of social networks. Teachers indicate the lack of feedback on activities and inappropriate methods. Finally, the institutions identify the facilities and their organization as one of the main complaints, as well as the lack of more meaningful learning opportunities (Torres et al., 2021).

In addition to these three agents directly involved in the teaching-learning process, the family is another agent implicated in the education of students. Earlier, the potential affective problems of students were mentioned as a limiting factor in achieving the expected grades. However, these problems are not necessarily due to the family and may derive from an adaptation problem. On the other hand, Martínez and Molina Derteano (2019) compare the economic evolution in Spain and Argentina and how this has affected the academic level of students in these countries. They show that families that are better able to support themselves economically in the face of crises have a greater capacity to acquire education, thus demonstrating how family factors are also influential in terms of school failure.

These factors are important issues to address since they ultimately affect a large percentage of students. This percentage varies depending on the country, the community, the university, the branch of knowledge and even the degree studied. The data range between 15 and 30% of the student body (Álvarez, 2021; Ministerio de Universidades, 2021; Fernández-Mellizo, 2022), affecting between 51,766 and 103,532 of students in Spain for the academic year 2021–2022.

In Andalusia, in particular, although many students are at risk of social exclusion or have grown up in disadvantaged socio-economic situations (Real, 2011), this conflictive context has prompted teachers in the community to devise new ways of teaching their classes thus remedying these negative social aspects.

Prior to university entrance, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) helps to systematically assess what young people know and are able to do at the end of their compulsory secondary education (ESO). The PISA reports detect how low scores on these tests lead to a higher dropout rate, with Andalusia being the only exception (García, 2009). This result is maintained throughout the university period, as Andalusia is one of the Autonomous Communities with an average dropout rate below the Spanish average.

Regarding university failure, Andalusia presents certain particularities. Some studies indicate that dropout is related to the socio-economic profile of the population, per capita income and unemployment rate (López-Martínez et al., 2016), with Andalusia being a community that leads these figures. However, dropout does not occur with the expected frequency (Cervero et al., 2017), which raises the question of whether social factors are really as influential as the characteristics of students, teachers and the institutions themselves in this community.

Based on the scientific literature consulted for this study, the aim is to analyze the research addressing academic dropout in higher education in Spain, subsequently focusing on Andalusia, in order to determine the causes of this situation and to provide proposals for its prevention at university level.

The research questions derived from the main objective and which guide this research are the following:

The Spanish University System in the academic year 2020–2021 was composed of 84 universities: 50 public and 34 privates. Of these, 21 (25%) have published studies related to academic dropout and are included in this review, with the University of Oviedo, the University of La Laguna, the University of Alcalá de Henares and the University of Granada standing out for their scientific production with between two and three published works. This low production rate may indicate that the problem of academic dropout seems not to have required the research attention of most Spanish universities, despite the fact that this problem affected 21.3% of first-year students in the academic year 2021–2022 (Ministerio de Universidades, 2022). This is the highest rate in Western countries. In the United States, the drop-out rate at the beginning of the second year is 6.2%, although more than 30% of US students do not obtain their degree 3 years after the legal duration of studies. In Finland the drop-out rate is 7.9 and 8.1% in the UK. The Spanish rate is only similar to that of the French-speaking Community of Belgium (21.1%) (Aina et al., 2022).

The dropout rate in Spanish universities as a whole is 33% if all years of study are considered, while in private universities this rate is much higher, with 62.1% of students dropping out of the degrees in which they enroll and more than half of those enrolled (51.5%) not completing any type of university studies (Ministerio de Universidades, 2022). According to Aina et al. (2022) the proportion of students who do not complete a degree programme (in the theoretical duration of plus 3 years) ranges from less than 20% in the UK, Israel, Switzerland, and Ireland to more than 40% in Brazil, Slovenia, Chile, Belgium (French Community), Sweden, Italy, Austria, and Estonia.

In the studies analyzed, the most decisive variable in terms of permanence or dropout, in both Spanish and Andalusian universities, was low academic performance. This is in line with other research (Hailikari et al., 2008; Diseth, 2011; Cerezo et al., 2015; Casanova et al., 2018). Academic performance during the first year reflects the academic competences students have when they start university studies or develop during their first year, their levels of engagement and their learning strategies, which could suggest that less successful students have a less well-defined vocational background or the educational pathway that has led them to higher education is not sufficiently grounded (Belloc et al., 2011; Vries et al., 2011). Given the high level of academic dropout, it is necessary to address the different intervening factors through research aimed at determining prior education, the usefulness of university guidance, learning strategies and communication skills.

Lack of social support is the second cause of dropout. Accordingly, in our opinion, interventions to reduce university dropout should encompass, among other factors, helping students to access family support and to develop personal connections at university to compensate for the absence of family support, as well as academically focused support for students who do not have a strong entry qualification (Sosu and Pheunpha, 2019). In the same vein, Rovira and Bertrán (2018) concluded that university dropout can be minimized through family support, but they also stress the need for university students to be rooted in social capital emanating from the peer group, to have enjoyed positive school experiences and to be boosted by intra-ethnic associationism.

While Arco-Tirado et al. (2011) propose tutoring sessions on planning and time management, together with cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies, motivational strategies and the use of designed materials, Gómez-Salazar and Álvarez Gil (2020) stress the need to anticipate the university stage by offering collaborative workshops between secondary schools and university centers at the pre-university stage to raise student awareness of the curricula, professional opportunities, skills needed to carry out the studies and those that will be achieved upon completion of their degree program.

While present, socio-economic reasons or insufficient scholarships are not the most significant causes of university dropout in Spain or Andalusia (Álvarez, 2021). These factors are very different between countries and national cultures, which influence educational institutions and practices in many ways. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that university dropout is also influenced by differences in national cultures and different levels of economic support (Troelsen and Laursen, 2014). The evidence from the studies reviewed in this article shows that obtaining more scholarships does not reduce the dropout rate and that, in Spain, significant socio-economic gaps do not appear to be a cause of dropout. From a negative social inheritance perspective, this means that students at socio-economic risk in Spain and Andalusia may drop out for exactly the same reasons as the average student. Therefore, the university education system, with its universalistic welfare intentions, seems to work.

Although the dropout rate from university studies in Spain is around 21% (for first-year students) and is the highest among its neighboring countries, research on this issue is lacking, with only 25% of Spanish universities having carried out research on this subject in the last 12 years. The studies analyzed in this review conclude that the causes of university dropout are associated with low academic performance, poor social support in the new academic environment, low socio-economic level, pessimism and lack of motivation, together with other less significant factors such as poor relationships with teachers, lack of vocation, work incompatibility, and previous academic performance, among the most frequently mentioned.

Despite the efforts of the researchers, the main limitations of this work have been found in the search for empirical evidence, as little scientific production has been detected to evaluate the results from a correlational statistical point of view that would allow the authors to analyze the relationship between the key words and their implication in the identified axes (as we have mentioned, only 25% of Spanish universities have carried out research on this subject in the last 12 years). Therefore, it has been difficult to contextualize research on university dropout in Spain and, specifically, in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, hence the relevance of our study.

The theoretical basis of each of the studies analyzed, the methods described, the universities and the students studied have in turn been very varied and therefore very complex, so another limitation was to synthesize the information. Despite the limitations, the usefulness of the findings may be significant at the higher education level, which could be useful for universities to develop programmes to prevent university dropout.

However, it is important to note that these statistics are simply average relative figures and do not show the heterogeneous components between institutions within the Spanish higher education system (i.e., different dropout rates according to the field of study, university facilities, admission rules, etc.) or within the same autonomous community.

Thus, the clearest line of future research would be to address university dropout, either in all the universities of the Andalusian Autonomous Community or at the national level, in order to obtain conclusions that would allow us to establish correlations between the different causes, territories or universities and, therefore, to find out how widespread this phenomenon is in the different Spanish autonomous communities.

Our study concludes that further research is needed on the causes of university dropout and its prevention through family support, anchoring students in their social roots, promoting positive academic experiences, encouraging associations among peers and, within the university, carrying out activities (such as workshops and seminars) to improve planning and time management, together with cognitive learning strategies, motivational strategies and the use of advanced learning materials [such as Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools]. In addition, prior to starting university, secondary school students should be made aware of the curricula, career opportunities, skills needed to pursue the studies and the competences to be achieved upon completion of their studies.

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

J-CC-C, M-NC-S, J-AM-D, and J-JV-M contributed to conception and design of the study. M-NC-S organized the database and performed the review. J-JV-M wrote the first draft of the manuscript. J-CC-C and J-AM-D wrote sections of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision and read and approved the submitted version.