In Secondary Education, there is a Serious School Dropout Problem in Colombia

In Colombia, secondary education (grades 10 and 11) represents a challenge for the educational system due to factors that include the lack of guarantees to access, remain in, and learn with quality standards. Added to this are territorial investment gaps, among others, which limit young people’s ability to complete their educational trajectories. Today, out of every 100 students who reach grade 9, only 75 continue to the secondary level, according to estimates from the Alliance for the Transformation of Secondary Education.

This figure does not account for those who drop out of the system along their educational trajectory. Additionally, many of the young people who manage to advance face delays in the development of basic competencies, which can limit their academic, professional, and labor development. Secondary education is a key stage in the formation of young people, as it consolidates previous learning and marks the beginning of their transition to post-secondary education or the labor market.

But there are other figures that are even more concerning. According to data from the Observatory of Educational Realities (ORE) of ICESI University, only 51% of adolescents between 15 and 16 years old are enrolled in secondary education, about 45% of students do not reach grade 11, and around 1.5 million school-age young people remain outside the educational system, showing the magnitude of the challenge.

The low retention and the poor development of essential learning in secondary education are due, among other things, to structural and social factors such as the lack of infrastructure, the scarcity of teachers and pedagogical resources, the disconnect between education and young people’s interests, problems of school coexistence, contexts of violence or migration, and economic needs that lead them to abandon their studies.

Four problems caused by not completing secondary education

Evidence shows that interruption and failure to complete secondary education exposes young people to at least four problems identified by different studies:

1. Limitation of social mobility: The cycle of poverty is reinforced by closing access to higher education (technical, technological, and professional). In addition, it deepens frustration and lack of opportunities, increasing young people’s vulnerability to risks such as substance use, teenage pregnancy, and delinquency.
2. Sustaining informality: Exclusion from the formal labor market leads young people to accept precarious jobs that require high physical effort, offer low stability, and provide no social security. In cities like Bogotá, around 37% of young people remain outside stable opportunities, according to the Observatory of the Colombian University, a figure that exceeds 80% in rural areas.
3. Amplifying intergenerational poverty: Poverty is perpetuated across generations by closing the main bridge to higher education and limiting access to qualified jobs, interrupting the development of essential competencies. This forces young people to reproduce the socioeconomic conditions of their origins and increases the likelihood of passing them on to the next generations.
4. Truncating the country’s economy: Colombia’s competitiveness is limited by reducing qualified human capital. This restricts the attraction of foreign investment, weakens innovation, and reduces GDP growth, consolidating an economy based on low-productivity labor.

This entire panorama reveals the need to transform secondary education in Colombia, ensuring fundamental learning and dignified conditions of access and retention from secondary school to post-secondary alternatives. Precisely in response to these challenges, the Alliance for the Transformation of Secondary Education (ATEM) emerged.

It is an initiative that seeks to unite efforts and resources to support the education secretariats in designing and implementing a public policy that helps create conditions for all young people to access and complete quality secondary education that promotes their integral development.

Since 2022, ATEM has developed a technical proposal based on seven components aimed at addressing the main challenges of the secondary level: low institutional capacity to ensure access and retention, absence of curricula centered on young people’s life projects, scarcity of technical, human, and financial resources, and teacher training that still does not fully incorporate pedagogical approaches centered on students’ interests and dreams.

Currently, ATEM works with 11 education secretariats (Antioquia, Medellin, Atlantico, Barranquilla, Santander, Bucaramanga, Norte de Santander, Cúcuta, Bogotá, Valle del Cauca, and Cali), and more than 300 educational institutions that have joined this transformative vision so that young people not only progress and graduate, but do so with sufficient learning to make informed and successful decisions about their future.