Evasão universitária e possibilidades para a atuação do Psicólogo no ensino superior.

Abstract

The student dropout is a phenomenon present in all public universities in Brazil, and has been a concern of several researchers in recent years. Thus, it has become increasingly necessary to create strategies that facilitate the permanence of students in the university, since only the expansion of places and the guarantee of enrollment do not concretize access to higher education. Preventive and intervention actions, which facilitate the adaptation process of the student to the university environment, are becoming urgent. Under these circumstances, this study aimed to investigate the main factors that contribute to the dropout of students from the Patos campus of Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), based on the perceptions of dropouts, teachers and psychologists. It is an applied field research, of a descriptive typology. For data collection, the virtual questionnaire and interview were used, with a sample of 110 dropout students (15% of the population), 45 teachers (36% of the population) and five psychologists (71% of the population). The data were obtained through content analysis and statistical treatment. The data collected point to the following profile of dropout students: mostly female, of mixed ethnicity and with family income between one and two minimum wages. More than 80% of these students were not part of any academic or student assistance program at the time of the evasion. Of the participants, 34% left in the first semester, and another 17% in the second, totaling 51% of dropouts in the first year of the course. More than 70% of the respondents had already started another graduation course after leaving. With regard to the reasons that contributed to their dropping out, the dropout students point to their personal interests, the fact that they do not feel part of the University context, psychological illness, the move to another course and the lack of identification with the profession. For the professors, what contributes most to the dropout of students is the lack of identification with the course, the financial problems and the conditions of socioeconomic vulnerability, the lack of or insufficient support from the institution and student assistance programs, the learning difficulties and low academic performance. For the psychologists linked to the Student Assistance Centers at UFCG, the dropout of students has been caused mainly by three reasons: the lack of identification of students with the course, related to factors such as immaturity for choosing the course, the demands of society and family for admission to university and the non-admission in the course that would be their first choice, the mental health problems, especially those generated by the difficulties of adaptation to the new context and by the frustrations related to the choice of the course, and the relationship with teachers and teaching methodologies, associated with the difficulty of adaptation to the new demands of study, quite different from those of high school. Based on the data collected, an Action Plan was built aimed at the preventive intervention of the Psychology Center of the CSTR on the dropout and its determinants, which will be carried out based on work with the entire academic community. It can be concluded that this research can stimulate the Public Management to reflect about the process of dropout in the university, raising the cooperation among the several subjects and academic sectors involved in this reality. Thus, it seeks to awaken new perspectives on the theme, proposing mechanisms that allow the creation of spaces for discussion about mental health and quality of life in the university context and fostering the permanence of students in graduation.