Vanesa Berlanga Silvente, Pilar Figuera Gazo, Ernest Pons Fanals

(Universidad de Barcelona, Spain)

 

 

Abstract: The social dimension of higher education is one of the key elements of university policies in the early 21st century. Among these are retention measures, scholarship policies and study aids that promote equity and guarantee income to families with fewer resources. In Spain, within the framework of the 2015 Strategy, the implementation of the salary scholarship is intended to ensure access to and persistence of university studies to those most economically disadvantaged social groups. This research produces an ex post facto study of descriptive-comparative nature, aimed at assessing the impact of the salary scholarship, as an economic factor, concerning equity, access and academic achievement in the first year of university. Presented are the results of a study aimed at identifying which factors associated with persistence have greater discrimination power in the permanence of students on scholarship. The study was conducted with a total of 642 undergraduate students awarded salary scholarships from the 2010-11 cohort of the University of Barcelona. Based on the results we can assert that the students who attend and pass less of the universities’ core courses and achieve less academic success seem to make the decision not to persevere, abandoning the academic major in which they originally enrolled in their first year of university.

 

 

Key words: social dimension; equity; salary scholarship; discriminant analysis; efficiency

 

JEL code: I20