Schrödinger’s student: when students both do and do not drop out

Student “drop out” is a key quality measure in European higher education, causing our understanding of dropout to depend heavily on statistics of what we choose to measure. Still, there is no shared operational definition of what dropout is. In this brief we highlight the policy problem of definitional elasticity where different measures in dropout statistics obscures rather than informs our understanding of student drop-out, and causes students to be portraited as Schrödinger’s students; counted as both “drop out” and “not drop out” simultaneously.