In short
- In Latin America and the Caribbean, fewer than half of those who start university graduate: 46%.
- In Mexico, 3 out of 10 students who start a bachelor's degree drop out during the first year.
- The most common causes are financial, academic, emotional and adjustment-related, and they rarely come alone.
- Grades warn late. A student's activity compared with their group changes weeks earlier.
How many graduate
In Latin America and the Caribbean, 46% of those who enter higher education graduate by age 25 to 29. In the United States, the same measure is 67%.
Source: Ferreyra, Avitabile, Botero, Haimovich and Urzúa, At a Crossroads: Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, World Bank, 2017.
When they leave
Dropout concentrates in the first year. In Mexico, 3 out of 10 students who start a bachelor's degree, at public and private universities, drop out during the first year (SEP, General Directorate of University and Intercultural Higher Education, May 2026). The national higher-education dropout rate was 7% in the 2023-2024 school year (SEP, Principales Cifras 2024-2025).
For an institution, that means the window to act is short: the first months matter more than the rest of the degree.
Why they leave
Four causes come up most often across the region:
- Money and work: lack of resources, the need to work, and the cost of transport, materials and housing.
- Academic gaps: gaps from earlier schooling that pile up course after course.
- Emotional health: stress, anxiety and mental health struggles that change how and how much they study.
- Adjustment and career fit: trouble adjusting to university life, or doubts about the chosen degree.
They rarely come alone. These are, for example, the causes cited by Mexico's SEP at the Universia Rectors' Meeting in May 2026.
Why report cards warn late
A grade is the last link in the chain: it reflects weeks of work that already happened. A student can keep submitting on time while they stop opening course material, log in less than their group and only show up to turn things in. By the first zero, the problem has been there for a while.
LMS activity changes earlier. That is why Pharis compares each student's logins and submissions with their group every week: in the illustrative case on the home page, the signal appears 8 weeks before the first zero.
What an institution can do
- Measure the whole group, every week. Not only those who ask for help: students about to leave rarely ask.
- Decide who follows up on each alert, and how fast. An alert without an owner changes nothing.
- Log every contact and how it ended. It is the only way to know which actions work at your institution.
- Add the financial signal, if there is one. An outstanding balance next to an academic drop calls for a different response.
- Review at the end of each term which alerts were right, and adjust with those outcomes.
How Pharis does it
Pharis reads the LMS every day in read-only mode, calculates each student's risk with explainable signals and sends it to the professor and each area with the reasons and a suggested action. Every contact is logged and Pharis measures whether the risk went down. The details are in How Pharis calculates dropout risk.