Resilience and Academic Dropout in Ecuadorian University Students during COVID-19

Abstract

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has had a global impact that has affected all areas of people’s lives. However, people have different capacities to adapt and cope with the adversities and traumatic events that may have occurred during the pandemic with different levels of resilience. One collective affected by this global crisis was university students, who had to face an unprecedented academic situation, resulting in some abandoning their studies. This study aims to analyse whether the resilience of the students could be related to academic dropout. To carry out this research, we assessed the resilience of 1676 university students from 11 universities in Ecuador. To do so, a committee of experts from the Ecuadorian Association of Social Work Education Centres and 11 Ecuadorian universities designed a questionnaire and sent it to the entire sample. Subsequently, we compared the levels of resilience between university students who withdrew from university during the COVID-19 pandemic with those who continued their studies by using a multivariate analysis. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences in all variables analysed. The students who obtained the highest scores were those who continued their studies, and those students who dropped out obtained the lowest scores. In summary, we found that school dropout among Ecuadorian university students during the COVID-19 pandemic was due to low levels of resilience. Therefore, increasing student resilience could improve university retention rates and, in turn, academic performance and future life prospects.