The Future of Education

School dropout and educational disengagement are increasingly conceptualized as cumulative and relational processes shaped by the interaction of institutional, familial, relational, and structural factors. This study aimed to identify latent profiles of school trajectory risk and to examine how these profiles are socially structured through associations with socioeconomic status, gender, race/ethnicity, and student labor participation.

The sample comprised public school students enrolled from the 9th grade to the 3rd year of upper secondary education in four Brazilian states (Rondônia, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, and Maranhão). Participants completed the IAFREE-A, a multidimensional instrument designed to assess protective and risk-related factors in school trajectories across relational and institutional domains. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was conducted to identify distinct configurations of risk. Model selection followed an analytic hierarchy process based on multiple fit indices (AIC, AWE, BIC, CAIC, CLC, and KIC). The best-fitting solution corresponded to Model 2 with three latent classes, presenting good classification quality (entropy ≈ 0.79), supporting clear separation between profiles, interpreted as low, medium, and high risk.

Subsequently, chi-square analyses were conducted to examine associations between latent profile membership and sociodemographic variables, including socioeconomic level (INSE), gender, race/ethnicity, and employment status. Significant associations were observed across all variables. Students in the high-risk profile were disproportionately concentrated in the lowest socioeconomic strata (INSE I–II), more frequently engaged in paid work, and more likely to be female and Indigenous. In contrast, the low-risk profile showed a higher concentration of male students and was not defined primarily by socioeconomic advantage. The medium-risk profile displayed weaker structural concentration, functioning as an intermediate and heterogeneous group.

Together, the findings indicate that the identified latent profiles are not socially neutral configurations but reflect structurally patterned forms of vulnerability. Relational and institutional risks are amplified through socioeconomic disadvantage, gendered inequalities, ethnic-racial stratification, and early labor insertion, supporting a process-oriented understanding of school trajectory risk. Methodologically, the integration of person-centered modeling (LPA) with contingency-based association tests (χ²) provides convergent evidence for the empirical robustness and social embeddedness of the identified profiles.