"Mine is an Atypical Case": An Analysis of Life Stories about the Experience of Higher Education Drop-Out

Abstract

This paper is derived from a field study in the framework of my doctoral dissertation, in which we analyze life stories (Bertaux, 2005) of young people who have discontinued their studies at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in four courses with a high rate of dropout between the years 2005-2015: Computer Engineering, Anthropological Sciences, Chemical Sciences and Communication Sciences. With that goal in mind, seventy-five interviews were conducted with fifty-nine people: sixteen key informants and forty-three young people who discontinued their university studies between 2005 and 2015.

In this paper we present one aspect of the analysis: the reconstruction of the symbolic framework of the discontinuation experience from the perspective of its protagonist, and how this outlines specific types of discontinuation.