Academic Deferral in Higher Education Under Uncertainty: A Neutrosophic Model for Its Understanding and Management

Abstract

Academic deferral, understood as the postponement of courses, practical work, or graduation projects, is a widespread phenomenon in Latin American higher education whose understanding is usually reduced to binary statistics of pass rates and dropout. The aim of this study was to build and demonstrate a neutrosophic model that represents each student academic situation through a triplet of effective progress, trajectory indeterminacy, and evidence of disengagement, and that maps it onto management categories with differentiated interventions. The research adopted a qualitative approach with a design research strategy, grounded in a documentary review of classical attrition models and predictive analytics, in the operationalisation of the triplet using existing administrative indicators, and in a computational demonstration on an illustrative cohort. Findings show that two students with identical progress receive different treatment once indeterminacy is explicitly represented, and that the derived attention index orders tutoring assignment without collapsing the triplet. The contribution of the model is representational rather than predictive.