University dropout prediction through educational data mining techniques: a systematic review

The dropout rates in the European countries is one of the major issues to be faced in a near future as stated in the Europe 2020 strategy. In 2017, an average of 10.6% of young people (aged 18-24) in the EU-28 were early leavers from education and training according to Eurostat’s statistics. The main aim of this review is to identify studies which uses educational data mining techniques to predict university dropout in traditional courses. In Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) catalogues, we identified 241 studies related to this topic from which we selected 73, focusing on what data mining techniques are used for predicting university dropout. We identified 6 data mining classification techniques, 53 data mining algorithms and 14 data mining tools.