Factors Affecting School Dropout and Completion in Mexico: Does Agency Matter?

Abstract

This paper examines which factors influence the opportunities of completing upper-secondary education in Mexico, rather than dropping out of it. Drawing on Sen’s capability approach and Bourdieu’s sociocultural-reproduction perspective, two research hypotheses are formulated to provide possible explanations of persons’ decisions to reach higher levels of schooling. These hypotheses are tested using data from Mexico’s First Survey of School Dropouts, carried out in 2011. The results of this study indicate that the probabilities of completing upper-secondary education are associated with several factors: socioeconomic and demographic variables, the type of upper-secondary institution attended, human agency and educational experiences. The evidence presented in this study supports research hypotheses based on Sen’s and Bourdieu’s approaches. Regarding the hypothesis from the capability approach, the study data show that human agency is not only intrinsically valuable but also instrumentally important, for reaching higher educational levels. The findings of this study also bear out Bourdieu’s argument that cultural and economic capital contribute to explain why students make progress in school, although, this paper challenges Bourdieu’s view of the role of freedom of educational choice. Finally, some implications for educational policies are discussed in the last section of this paper.

Keywords:

• Education
• Agency
• School dropout
• Cultural capital
• Quantitative methods

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. David Raffe (+), Cristina Iannelli, Ellen Boeren and  Markus Klein offered very useful feedback and suggestions on previous versions of this research. The author is also grateful to Pedro Flores-Crespo for earlier discussions on the capability approach. This article is part of a research funded by the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the Author

Dulce Carolina Mendoza Cazarez holds a PhD in Education from the University of Edinburgh, a Master’s in Educational Research from the Universidad Iberoamericana and a BA in Economics from the Universidad de Sonora. Her research interests include education, inequalities and social justice, education policy and human development.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología [grant number 215331].