Worldwide, one of the main concerns of universities is to reduce the dropout
rate. Several initiatives have been taken to avoid this problem; however, it
is essential to recognize at-risk students as early as possible. This
article is an extension of a previous study that proposed a predictive model
to identify students at risk of dropout from the beginning of their
university degree. The new contribution is the analysis of the feature
importance for dropout segmented by faculty, degree program, and semester in
the different predictive models. In addition, we propose a dropout model
based on faculty characteristics to try to infer the dropout based on
faculty features. We used data of 30,576 students enrolled in a Higher
Education Institution ranging from years 2000 to 2020. The findings indicate
that the variables related to Grade Point Average(GPA), socioeconomic
factor, and a pass rate of courses taken have a more significant impact on
the model, regardless of the semester, faculty, or program. Additionally, we
found a significant difference in the predictive power between Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and humanistic programs.
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