Contemporary Education Challenges: University Dropout

Lately policy makers, educators, specialist from education field become interested about statistics concerning study dropout. In university there are some programs that have registered a higher rate of dropout (for example, engineering, as EUROSTUDENT 8 (2024) study indicate). Brewer et al. (2019), Fenech (2025) indicated in their study that student wellbeing and dropout are connected. Also, Hauschildt (2024) get to the conclusion that students study situation is strongly corelated with wellbeing. Fenech (2025) demonstrated that wellbeing is an important factor that reduce the risk for study dropout. Starting from this background, the purpose of our study was to identify the main reasons that our students (engineering sciences) like or dislike university activities and what is their perception (after their first session of exams) on the relation between three types of curriculum: taught, learned and tested. Working with students that have chosen psycho-pedagogic study program (85 students from technical faculties in their first year of study, university year 2024-2025, second semester), during seminar activities, we have organized a study based on focus-group interviews and reflective exercises. An important finding was that discovering new things and socialization are the main reasons for liking school activities and perceived difficulties of tasks and level of information are reasons for not liking school. These findings inspire us to propose measures for improving activities in university as measures for preventing risk and dropout. Other results are discussed here.