HIGHER EDUCATION IN PRISON IN SPAIN: THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATIONAL SUPPORTS ABOUT SCHOOL DROPOUT

School dropout is a major problem both for distance universities offering studies in prison and for students who are unable to fulfil the future expectations placed in them. In Spain, the responsibility for higher education in prison remains almost exclusively with the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). This article focuses on the study of the effects of the absence of educational support on dropout, which is an essential and not well-known question for university education intervention in prison. The work is carried out from an articulation of methods that investigates prison higher education dropout by using official academic registration data from the UNED and open interviews with educational professionals working in prison. The result corroborates that both the absence of educational support and the previous academic experience of students are related to dropping out of studies.