The University of Minho assured on Tuesday that about 90% of students completed the two master’s programs that, according to the Ministry of Education statistics, had been reported as courses where all students dropped out after one year.
Last Friday, the Infocursos portal released information on higher education courses available in Portugal, providing a parameter to determine where new students were one year after enrolling. The options include graduating, remaining enrolled in the same course, changing courses, or no longer being enrolled in the national higher education system.
Data from the Directorate-General of Education and Science Statistics (DGEEC) indicated that 100% of freshmen enrolled in the master’s programs “Construction Information Modeling – BIM A+” and “Advanced Structural Analysis and Design with Composite Materials – FRP++” at the University of Minho were no longer enrolled in any course.
However, the institution clarified that these two master’s programs (European) “are only one year long and not two, unlike most master’s programs in Portugal, and at the time of the report, dissertations were being defended, and grades were being finalized.”
The University of Minho asserts that the “completion rate of both master’s programs is close to or exceeds 90%,” even though the DGEEC platform shows zero students as already graduated.
When questioned by Lusa about this discrepancy, the Ministry of Education, Science, and Innovation stated that the DGEEC data available on Infocursos for the two University of Minho courses “are consistent with the values reported by the institution in the RAIDES survey.”
The data released last week by DGEEC identified eleven courses where all new students enrolled in the academic years of 2021/2022 or 2022/2023 were not found in higher education the following year. This indicator has been in place for about a decade and aims to better understand cases of school dropout.
