Dropping out of the early school leaving, especially among girls

This article was published in "el diari de l'educació" on February 3, 2022 and shows us how the "sex" variable is also important when considering early school leaving.

The latest survey of the active population (EPA) indicates that in 2021 the rate of early school leaving among young people aged 18 to 24 has dropped considerably throughout Spain and also in Catalonia, which nevertheless continues to be, with the 14.8%, among the autonomous communities with a higher early school-leaving index.

The pandemic also brings some good news: in 2021 there has been a sharp drop in the dropout of young people at the age to continue training in the post-compulsory stage, as reflected in the latest EPA (active population survey) published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). In Catalonia it has gone from 17.4% in 2020 to 14.8%, a drop similar to that of the national average (from 16% to 13.3%). In the Balearic Islands the drop is even more pronounced, as it goes from 21.3% to 15.4%. These data reflect a trend, although they do not coincide to a millimeter with those also published by Idescat.

Murcia and Andalusia are the autonomous communities with the worst indicators, since in both cases the dropout rate exceeds 17%, while the communities with better figures are the Basque Country (4.8%), Cantabria (6.4 %), Galicia (8.1%) and Navarre (9.1%). All four are below the European average of 9.9%, and thus below the 10% target set by the European Union for a long time.

Of course, this drop has a lot to do with the economic context resulting from the pandemic, since the lack of job prospects has the consequence that a sector of the youth population continues to study once they have passed the compulsory stage. During the long crisis that began in 2008, the early school-leaving rate did not stop falling, but with the slight economic recovery experienced between 2016 and 2019, the trend was towards stagnation and there was even a year with a small upswing.

By gender, at the national level the sharpest decline has been among boys, since it has gone from 31% in 2011 to 16.7% in 2021, while girls have gone from 21.5% to 9.7 %. In Catalonia, this pattern is similar, but if you take only the data for the evolution of the last year, a pronounced reduction in the dropout rate among girls is observed, as it goes from 17.4% to 9.9% (in fact, 8 points in one year!), while in the case of boys the drop is much lighter: from 21.3% to 19.4%. In other words, a year ago there was a gap of 3.9 points between them, which has now more than doubled and practically reaches 10 percentage points.

More university students

The labor force survey also provides other indicators related to education. For example, in 2021, 48.7% of the population aged 25-34 will have attained the higher education level, a figure that improves by 1.3 points on the previous year and that is quite close to above the European average (40.5%). The percentage in the case of women (54.4%), which clearly exceeds that of men, stands out.

It also contains an indicator of the participation of the adult population in training, considered as the percentage of the population aged 25 to 64 that has followed some type of training in the last four weeks. In this case, the growth is also significant, since it goes from 11% in 2020 to 14.4% in 2021, a variation that greatly exceeds those registered during the previous years, and which is undoubtedly also closely related to the economic context resulting from the pandemic.

For further information at European level, read here