At university level the consequences of dropout can roughly be divided into an economic and an
academic part. The introduction of performance-based university funding schemes in many
countries within the past decade (see below) makes dropout, including student transfer, purely
negative in an economic sense for the affected university. Furthermore, within a university
pedagogical perspective where one goal is to get as many students to complete their studies as
successfully as possible, dropout must inevitably be viewed negatively. From the point of view of
the academia dropout can, however, have both undesirable and desirable consequences. Dropout
is undesirable to the extent that dropout means the loss of valuable academic input from the
students who dropped out (Larsen, 2000: 13). If dropout equals a situation where the
academically most foreign students leave university, dropout could be seen as desirable from the
internal logic of the academic field because this is a way of preserving and reproducing the
dominant culture within the academic field (Bourdieu, 1990, 1998) and upholding the academic
standards as well.