Beyond tuition-free higher education: financial stress, student sustainability, and persistence-related vulnerability in Ecuador

Introduction

Tuition-free higher education removes a major barrier to access, but it does not eliminate the material conditions required to remain academically engaged. Across Latin America, university continuity is shaped by the interaction of socioeconomic circumstances, employment, family responsibilities, academic demands, and institutional support rather than by tuition alone (Cavagnoud and Ames, 2024; Loor Vinces, 2025). Ecuador is especially relevant to this discussion because public undergraduate higher education is constitutionally tuition-free, subject to the regulatory principle of academic responsibility (Constitución del Ecuador, 2008; Ley Orgánica de Educación Superior, 2010; Reglamento de Gratuidad, 2014).

Participation in a tuition-free system nevertheless entails indirect costs and opportunity costs associated with work and family responsibilities. Food insecurity provides a concrete example: among 730 university students in Quito, almost half experienced food insecurity related to economic restrictions and food prices, while recent multicountry evidence identifies similar material vulnerability among students at public universities in Latin America (Cahilog et al., 2025; Eche and Hernández, 2018; Wallinger et al., 2026). These findings show that formal gratuity can coexist with financially constrained participation.

Existing research documents associations between financial pressure and reduced study time, difficulty obtaining learning resources, concentration problems, and other forms of academic vulnerability (Moore et al., 2021; Russell et al., 2025). However, the dominant language of access, retention, and persistence does not fully capture whether the conditions supporting continued enrollment remain viable. Retention describes continued enrollment from an institutional perspective, while persistence generally refers to continuation toward an educational goal. Neither concept necessarily indicates whether the student's financial, material, temporal, family-social, and institutional conditions remain sufficiently stable to sustain that trajectory.

This Perspective therefore proposes student sustainability as a complementary lens: the capacity to maintain an academically viable university trajectory under sufficiently stable financial-material, temporal, family-social, and institutional conditions. The exploratory survey presented below is used as contextual evidence rather than as a measure of actual persistence. The discussion develops this position through four linked themes: indirect costs beyond tuition, the relationship between financial pressure and academic vulnerability, exploratory contextual evidence from Ecuadorian students, and the institutional implications of shifting from access alone toward student sustainability.

Beyond tuition-free access: the material conditions of participation

The central premise is that tuition-free provision and cost-free participation are not equivalent. A descriptive summary of the three exploratory composite indices is presented in Table 1. In Ecuador, Guamán-Paredes et al. (2020) identify food, housing, transportation, internet, health, and other expenditures as hidden costs of public higher education. Cruzatty Vélez et al. (2025) likewise report that insufficient income, employment demands, transportation, limited digital access, and geographic distance can constrain university continuity. These pressures influence whether students can reach campus, access course materials, remain connected, eat adequately, and allocate sufficient time to study.

Table 1. Descriptive summary of the exploratory composite indices.

The overall eligible sample comprised 89 participants. Analytical sample sizes differed because composite scores were calculated only when participants met the specified minimum valid-item requirement applied in the revised analysis: at least 6 of 7 items for financial stress, 4 of 5 items for academic impact, and all 3 items for interruption/dropout-related risk. Accordingly, 2, 3, and 8 participants, respectively, did not have sufficient valid responses to calculate the corresponding composite score. Ambiguous single-item responses were treated as missing, no values were imputed, and Q17 and Q23 were reverse-coded.

Food insecurity illustrates how material vulnerability can persist despite formal access. Eche and Hernández (2018) found that economic restrictions affected food security among students in both public and private universities in Quito, including cases in which low-income students skipped meals. Wallinger et al. (2026) extend this concern to public universities in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, where food insecurity remained common and was associated with diet quality and living arrangements. Such evidence suggests that the sustainability of enrollment depends partly on everyday resources that conventional tuition-based definitions of affordability may overlook.

Employment and mobility create a similar tension. Students who work to finance routine expenses may protect their short-term capacity to remain enrolled while simultaneously reducing the time and cognitive resources available for academic work. Transportation costs and long travel times can generate comparable trade-offs, particularly when attendance depends on daily mobility from peripheral or rural areas. Ecuadorian evidence therefore points to a broader affordability problem: the financial burden of higher education is distributed across multiple recurring expenditures and opportunity costs rather than concentrated only in tuition (Cruzatty et al., 2025; Silva-Martínez et al., 2023).

Financial support mechanisms also matter, but their existence does not guarantee effective protection. Evidence from Cuenca indicates that scholarships and educational-credit alternatives may be insufficient relative to student demand and may be poorly communicated to potential beneficiaries (Sinchi and Gómez, 2018). Accordingly, student vulnerability should not be reduced to household income alone. What matters is the interaction between resources, recurring expenses, unexpected shocks, employment obligations, and the accessibility of institutional support.

From financial stress to academic vulnerability

Financial pressure becomes educationally relevant when it begins to interfere with the academic experience. Research on university students links financial stress with concentration difficulties, reduced wellbeing, competing employment demands, and constraints on participation (Andrews et al., 2024; Buenaño et al., 2024; Moore et al., 2021). Studies of persistence similarly emphasize that continuation reflects interactions among financial, family, employment, and institutional conditions rather than a single determinant (Delahunty and O'Shea, 2025; Nieuwoudt and Pedler, 2023).

The conceptual pathway distinguishes three related but non-equivalent states. Financial stress refers to recurring concern about meeting university and daily expenses. Academic vulnerability refers to difficulties that may become visible while the student remains enrolled, such as reduced study time, concentration problems, postponed activities, limited access to materials, or occasional absence; in the exploratory survey, this dimension is represented by the associated academic-impact index. Persistence-related vulnerability refers to self-reported concern about temporary interruption or withdrawal if financial conditions worsen; in the survey, it is represented by interruption/withdrawal-related items. These constructs organize the proposed framework but are not treated as empirically established stages.

Student sustainability provides the broader interpretive concept. Persistence asks whether students continue toward an educational goal; student sustainability asks whether the conditions enabling that continuation remain sufficiently stable. This distinction matters because a student may be enrolled, intend to graduate, and still experience an increasingly fragile academic trajectory. Financial stress is therefore most useful institutionally as a potential early signal to be interpreted alongside academic, family, temporal, and institutional information rather than as a deterministic indicator of dropout.

A sustainability perspective also shifts the point of institutional attention toward earlier material and academic strain rather than waiting for visible deterioration or withdrawal intentions. Repeated difficulty paying for transportation, reduced food access, insufficient connectivity, lack of materials, or excessive working hours may indicate that the conditions supporting participation are weakening. Figure 1 summarizes the proposed relationship among financial stress, academic vulnerability, persistence-related vulnerability, and preventive institutional response.

Exploratory contextual evidence: what the survey adds—and what it does not

To contextualize this argument, an anonymous Google Forms survey was conducted from July 26 to July 28, 2026. All 98 submissions received during that period were considered. Eligibility required electronic informed consent, age 18 years or older, and current enrollment in an undergraduate program. Ninety-five respondents provided consent, and 89 of these were currently enrolled and formed the eligible sample; all 89 eligible participants were 18 years of age or older. Records without consent or current enrollment were excluded from analysis. The form's original configuration did not technically prevent subsequent entries after a non-consent response; however, all records indicating non-consent were identified before analysis and excluded in full. No prior ethics-committee review or formal exemption was obtained; this circumstance is stated transparently for editorial assessment.

The author-developed questionnaire was not a validated scale and was used only for exploratory contextualization. Items were grouped conceptually into perceived financial stress (Q11-Q17), associated academic impact (Q18-Q22), and interruption/dropout-related self-reported risk (Q23-Q25); Q17 and Q23 were reverse-coded. Ambiguous exported responses containing more than one option for a single-response item were treated as missing, with no imputation. To preserve most of the information represented by each composite while avoiding scores based on substantially incomplete item sets, an 80% minimum valid-item requirement was applied. Accordingly, financial-stress scores required at least 6 of 7 valid items and academic-impact scores at least 4 of 5 valid items. Because the interruption/dropout-related risk index contained only three items and showed comparatively lower internal consistency, all three valid responses were required for its calculation. Under these criteria, 87 of 89 eligible participants had a calculable financial-stress score, 86 had a calculable academic-impact score, and 81 had a calculable interruption/dropout-related risk score. Therefore, 2, 3, and 8 participants, respectively, had insufficient valid item responses to calculate the corresponding composite score.

The descriptive pattern is consistent with the perspective advanced here. Financial stress had the highest mean score (M = 2.93, SD = 0.83), followed by academic impact (M = 2.59, SD = 0.97) and interruption/dropout-related risk (M = 2.07, SD = 0.87). Spearman correlations with 10,000-resample bootstrap confidence intervals showed a strong association between financial stress and academic impact (ρ = 0.77, n = 84, 95% CI [.63,.86]), a weaker association between financial stress and interruption/dropout-related risk (ρ = 0.33, n = 80, 95% CI [.11,.53]), and a moderate association between academic impact and interruption/dropout-related risk (ρ = 0.43, n = 78, 95% CI [.22,.61]). A stricter sensitivity analysis restricted to participants with complete responses across all 15 index items (n = 66) yielded ρ = 0.74,.37, and.45, respectively, preserving the same relative pattern. The findings therefore indicate cross-sectional covariation among the three dimensions but do not establish temporal ordering or prediction.

Discussion and institutional implications

Taken together, the conceptual argument and exploratory evidence support a distinction between continued enrollment and the sustainability of that enrollment. Financial stress was more strongly associated with academic impact than with interruption-related concerns, a pattern compatible with the proposition that material strain may be visible in the academic experience while students remain enrolled. This interpretation is consistent with literature describing persistence and dropout as multidimensional processes rather than outcomes attributable to a single financial factor (Delgado Saeteros, 2024; Loor Vinces, 2025). The cross-sectional evidence does not demonstrate that the proposed sequence occurs temporally, but it illustrates why formal enrollment alone may be insufficient for understanding the viability of a student's academic trajectory.

A sustainability-oriented institutional response would focus on identifying material pressures early and linking students with proportionate support rather than classifying financially stressed students as future dropouts. Depending on institutional capacity, this may include emergency assistance, scholarships, food or transportation support, connectivity and equipment, academic tutoring, flexible referral pathways, and coordination with student-welfare services. Support must also be visible and usable: Ecuadorian evidence suggests that limited awareness can reduce the practical reach of scholarships and educational-credit alternatives even when programs exist (Sinchi and Gómez, 2018). Reviews of retention strategies likewise emphasize integrated socioeconomic, academic, and psychosocial support rather than reliance on a single intervention (Rubio-Tobar, 2025). The present survey did not test the effectiveness of any of these interventions.

Such an approach would require safeguards. Screening should be voluntary, proportionate, and designed to connect students with support rather than label them as likely dropouts. Financial information should not be interpreted in isolation because similar levels of financial pressure may have different academic consequences depending on family support, employment flexibility, commuting distance, program demands, and institutional resources. Student sustainability is therefore best understood as a multidimensional condition rather than as a single threshold or risk score.

Limitations and research agenda

Several limitations define the scope of the exploratory evidence. The sample was small, non-probabilistic, and recruited through convenience and participant referral, while institutional affiliation was not recorded; consequently, the findings cannot be generalized to any specific university, Guayaquil, or Ecuadorian higher education. The questionnaire was developed by the authors and did not undergo formal expert review, cognitive interviewing, factor analysis, or prior content and construct validation. The interruption/dropout-related index also showed only modest internal consistency (α = 0.68), reinforcing its use as a descriptive exploratory indicator rather than a validated risk scale.

Measurement uncertainty was introduced by ambiguous exported responses, although these were treated as missing and the stricter complete-case sensitivity analysis preserved the principal correlational pattern. All variables were self-reported at one point in time, which permits shared-method effects, recall error, and subjective interpretation. Most importantly, the survey did not observe actual reenrollment, credit progression, interruption, withdrawal, or degree completion. The empirical component therefore cannot determine whether financial stress precedes academic difficulties or predicts future persistence.

Future research should proceed in two complementary directions. First, the questionnaire requires formal content validation, cognitive testing, and factor-analytic evaluation in larger samples. Second, longitudinal multi-institutional studies should record institutional affiliation and socioeconomic context and follow reenrollment, credit progression, interruption, withdrawal, and degree completion. Combining self-reports with administrative academic indicators and objective financial measures would permit stronger tests of temporal ordering and predictive relevance. The proposed concept of student sustainability also requires direct empirical evaluation to determine whether its financial-material, temporal, family-social, and institutional dimensions add explanatory value beyond persistence, retention, financial wellbeing, and student success. Until such evidence is available, student sustainability should remain a conceptual framework for asking not only whether students stay, but whether the conditions that allow them to stay remain viable.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2026.1957556/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Rany Sam, National University of Battambang, Cambodia

Reviewed by: Ramona Nasr, Lebanese American University, Lebanon

Da Vuthea, University of Battambang, Cambodia