A evasão dos estudantes da universidade: um estudo de caso na Unioeste, Campus de Cascavel

Abstract

Higher education in Brazil, mainly in public and free education, since its origin is characterized as being destined to the elite of Brazilian society. According to the authors studied in this research, the university reproduces inequalities that limit the access and can hinder the permanence of students in their interior from the moment that it adopts elite culture, in other words, the culture of the ruling class, both in the evaluations imputed to students and in the day-to-day relationship in the classroom. According to this scenario, this research aimed to understand the phenomenon of student evasion dropout at public universities whose empirical object is the Western Parana State University (UNIOESTE), Campus of Cascavel. Thus, some questionnaires were applied to the evaded students from 2012 to 2016, as well as, there were some interviews with the under-graduation coordinators and Key-Managers of the institution. The results showed that there is no single cause that motivated the academics at Campus of Cascavel to dropout their courses, since it is a multi-causal phenomenon. On the other hand, the causes stated by those studied academics did not match the hypotheses of causes indicated by under-graduation coordinators and Key-managers. It was also realized that responsibility for dropout is more attributed to external reasons than for institutional ones. Finally, it is concluded that the absence of policies regarding permanency according to the institution as well as the lack of a program to avoid the students’ dropout shows that this issue has been extenuated by the institution due to the lack of knowledge about the true index of evasion, disregard of indexes relevance and the invisibility of social inequality at the institution as well as the consequent reproduction of this asymmetry.