Evasion in higher education: definitions and trajectories

Abstract

The evasion phenomenon is considered one of the Ministry of Education main concerns and seen as a target to be tackled or an index to be reduced. The term appears in some public policies for Higher Education, such as REUNI (BRASIL, 2007), SINAES (BRASIL, 2004) and PNAES (BRASIL, 2010). However, the bibliographic research done in order to map a larger search called: Evasion, retention and permanence: social inclusion and the right to education has revealed that expert analysis and official documents are showing divergences and/or insufficiencies and brought together phenomena of different kind. The divergence has been based on criteria that almost never differentiated by causality or motivation for loss of bond with the institution. Indeed, the purpose of this article moves towards pointing out the limits of the current definitions about evasion in Federal Higher Education, reinforcing the importance of definitions based on causalities and, finally, reaching an appropriate definition of evasion for the formulation and evaluation of policies for Federal Higher Education. For this, it was decided to make a mapping of the bibliographic production on the subject, a brief retrieval of official documents about the topic and the specialized bibliography and then launch a suggestion for the debate about evasion, in the understanding of this phenomenon as a social indicator.