Culture, Money and Family Shape Who Drops Out of Brazilian Higher Education

When a student walks away from a university course, institutional records describe the event with a single word: dropout. But a new study of a Brazilian federal institute argues that this seemingly individual decision is, in fact, a socially structured process of exclusion that begins long before the student ever sets foot on campus. Drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and a rare statistical mapping of students’ social positions, researchers traced how culture, money and family configuration combine to determine who survives and who is quietly pushed out of higher professional education in one of the most unequal countries on Earth.

The study, published in SN Social Sciences, focused on two courses at the São Paulo Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology, Bragança Paulista campus: Mathematics Education and Technology in Systems Analysis and Development. These were chosen because they carry the campus’s highest dropout rates, at 69 percent and 54.9 percent respectively. Led by Karla Cristiny Moraes da Silva of the Federal University of São Carlos and the Federal Institute of São Paulo, together with Silvio Eduardo Alvarez Candido and Márcio Rogério Silva, the research distinguishes carefully between the observable event of dropout and the deeper structural process the authors call exclusion. A school system that formally admits students of all social origins, they argue, following Bourdieu and Passeron, may continue to exclude some of them from within, through a gradual process of elimination or self-elimination conditioned by each student’s position in the social space.

Methodologically, the study is notable for operationalizing a theoretical program that Bourdieu himself proposed but which has rarely been applied to dropout research. The team adopted a prosopographic approach, building standardized biographical records for former students covering social origin, family, schooling, occupation and assets. Data from the institution’s academic systems, Sistec and Suap, spanning eight years of enrollments from 2009 to 2017, were combined with an electronic survey that yielded 110 responses from alumni of the two courses. The researchers then applied Multiple Correspondence Analysis, or MCA, a geometric modelling technique designed to map the relative positions of individuals based on categorical variables, implemented in R with the FactoMineR package. Thirty categorical variables covering indicators of cultural and economic capital were fed into the model, which projects individuals onto a Cartesian plane where proximity expresses similarity in social properties.

The MCA revealed a striking structure. The vertical axis of the mapped social space was associated with economic capital and family structure, while the horizontal axis captured cultural capital and age. A subsequent cluster analysis, using hierarchical clustering on principal components with Ward’s criterion consolidated by a k-means step, sorted the respondents into four groups. The largest, 47 students, were labeled aspiring hardworkers: young people born in the 1990s, raised mostly by their biological parents, whose parents had basic-level occupations and whose own income, when they worked, was typically below two minimum wages. Cluster one, 36 students called older hardworkers, were born mostly before 1990, were often heads of household with dependents, supported themselves exclusively through their own labor, and came from large families with very low parental schooling; 68.4 percent had started working before turning 14.

The third cluster, 22 students from the middle and lower middle class, stood out for its relative affluence: higher family incomes, civil servant parents in occupations such as engineering, analysis and nursing, high rates of car ownership and even household help, and the highest proportion of students who had previously attended private schools. The fourth cluster, just five students classified as members of what Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza provocatively calls the rabble, came from small, single-parent families headed by mothers in low-status occupations, with family income below two minimum wages and no independent income of their own. Souza’s framework, which adapts Bourdieu to the Brazilian reality, distinguishes the upper class, the culturally endowed middle class, the new working class of hardworkers and the precarious working class, and it proved essential to interpreting the mapped positions.

The dropout figures attached to these clusters are the study’s most sobering result. Among survey respondents, the middle and lower middle class group had the lowest dropout rate, which was still 68.2 percent. The older hardworkers dropped out at a rate of 94.4 percent, the aspiring hardworkers at 85.1 percent, and not a single rabble student in the database completed the analyzed courses, a 100 percent exclusion rate. Only about 20 percent of the students analyzed belonged to the middle class. For the vast majority, these students were the first generation of their families to reach higher education, a position that imposed significant barriers to completion. The authors stress that these proportions describe their respondents rather than the full population, since the survey overrepresented non-completers and response rates were low, but the pattern within the sample is unmistakable.

To understand how these structural positions were lived and interpreted, the team conducted eleven in-depth interviews with alumni selected from the mapped clusters, coded through content analysis following Bardin’s method. The accounts illustrate how social position shaped both the meaning of higher education and the strategies for surviving it. Fabiano, the rabble student who left the systems analysis course, still considered it transformative, valuing the technical knowledge it gave him, but he found the academic load overwhelming and perceived a hidden, competitive dispute among classmates. He left when he judged he had already acquired what the job market required, an instrumental relationship with higher education that echoes Lehmann’s findings on working-class students. Today he works in the IT department of a bank, in what he calls his dream job.

Among the older hardworkers, only Eduarda finished her course, and her case proved pivotal. She was the only member of her family never encouraged to enter higher education, entering instead through a social project of popular courses, and she found the institute intimidating. What saved her was what the authors, following Kurantowicz and Nizinska, call relational retention practices: an extroverted temperament that let her build a study network of colleagues, and teachers who consistently helped her assimilate content, combined with student assistance that meant she did not have to work. The three excluded members of her cluster, despite family encouragement and technical backgrounds, reported difficulties relating to classmates and reconciling work with study, and they left when adverse circumstances accumulated. By contrast, the aspiring hardworkers and middle-class students completed their courses through more individualistic, biographical retention strategies, confident in their ability to learn autonomously, with completion so naturalized in their families that parental encouragement barely featured in their accounts. Two middle-class interviewees, Hélio and Gabriela, displayed such freedom of choice that they left the institute over course indecision, one graduating in arts and the other moving to distance learning.

The findings also expose an uncomfortable mismatch in Brazilian inclusion policy. Affirmative action quotas reached 40 percent of the rabble cluster and 23.4 percent of aspiring hardworkers, but only 6.7 percent of the older hardworkers, the group with the second-highest exclusion rate, partly because the quota law was phased in from 2013 and many older students had already enrolled. The authors suggest that criteria based on school type, income and race may fail to capture properties such as age, employment and family structure that define these students’ disadvantage. Student assistance scholarships, by contrast, were distributed fairly across the vulnerable clusters. The study proposes four hypotheses for policy design: inclusion criteria that reflect the multidimensional structure of disadvantage revealed by the MCA; retention support targeted at the highest-risk positions, including flexible schedules and academic preparation for older working students; structured opportunities for peer study groups and mentoring rather than leaving supportive relationships to chance; and the use of administrative systems institutions already maintain, such as Sistec and Suap, to build relational maps identifying at-risk students at entry.

Beyond its immediate policy implications, the research makes a methodological argument with reach across the Global South, where the late-2000s expansion of public higher education in Brazil brought first-generation, often older and working students into institutions designed for more privileged groups. By combining geometric data analysis with interviews, the study reads students’ position-takings against the structure that conditions them, showing that the encounter between the habitus of disadvantaged students and the institutional habitus of a demanding academy generates a generalized hysteresis, a lag between inherited dispositions and new conditions, that students experience not as arbitrariness but as personal failure. The Brazilian data also confirmed Souza’s thesis that family structure functions as a kind of family capital in the lowest social classes, a property that should complement Bourdieu’s original forms of capital in analyses of deeply unequal societies. The authors are careful about the limits of their claims: the analysis is descriptive rather than causal, covers two courses on one campus, and the smallest cluster supports only tentative readings. Yet the core insight travels well beyond Bragança Paulista. Dropout, they show, is rarely a free choice. It is the visible end of a chain of positions, capitals and family configurations that societies themselves have built, and only by recognizing that structure can institutions begin to dismantle it.

Subject of Research: Social determinants of dropout and exclusion from higher professional education in Brazil

Article Title: Relational structures of exclusion of higher professional education in Brazil: culture, money and family

Article References: da Silva, K. C. M., Candido, S. E. A., & Silva, M. R. (2026). Relational structures of exclusion of higher professional education in Brazil: culture, money and family. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 525. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01830-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01830-w

Keywords: higher education, dropout, social inequality, Bourdieu, Brazil, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, cultural capital, family structure, Federal Institutes, first-generation students, affirmative action, sociology of education