Abstract
Prolonged higher education is the condition in which a student requires longer time to complete all the coursework for graduation. At the Federal University of Espírito Santo, 52.2% of the students who should have graduated between February 2007 and January 2012 were retained. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the factors associated with the retention of students and propose institutional actions to resolve this problem. The methodology consists of comparing two groups of students (retained and graduated) by means of a logistic regression model. The results indicate that 21 factors were involved in the process, of which the most significant included the following: the accumulated coefficient of performance, the number of failures; the ratio of applicants/vacancies in the entrance examination, the knowledge of the subjects, the performance in the second stage of the entrance examination, and the process of completing the coursework.
Higher education; Student retention; Prolonged higher education; Logistic regression
