This projects aims at identifying and analysing typical trajectories of success, failure and dropping-out among higher education students, relating them to structural and institutional parameters, and looking for explanatory factors and best practices. The scope of the project is nationwide and it spreads through the various Portuguese higher education subsystems. The analysis is carried out at three levels: structural, institutional and biographical, using statistical sources, surveys, institutional documents and in-depth interviews. The project is included in the programme “The Promotion of Educational Success and the Fight against Dropping-Out and Failure in Higher Education” of MCTES (Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education) and is supported by FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology). The research team is formed on the basis of a consortium between CIES-ISCTE and ISFLUP, and has also the cooperation of other higher education institutions and students’ unions.

The study of the relationship between qualification systems and systems of formal and informal regulation of the Portuguese labour market represents the main objective of this project. The starting hypothesis of the research is that in specific sectors of economic activity the lack of demanding labour-market regulating mechanisms and instruments, from the perspective of formal qualifications, has the effect of removing the pressure on formal qualification systems to perform better. This research project aims to describe the ways of recruiting groups with different qualification levels and integrating them into the labour market and to analyse how they are affected unequally by phenomena such as precarious labour, unemployment and the development of new forms of work organization;  to describe the factors that condition the present performance of the Portuguese educational system and phenomena like repetition of a year or early school-leaving (dropping out of school), in particular before the end of compulsory education.