This paper focused on understanding the factors associated with college dropout in public and private institutions in Paraguay. 

College dropout is a relevant and overarching topic of concern of many in higher education and the study seems to try to take a novel measure to examine this construct. 

While the idea has merit and interest, the overall framework, description, analyses, and conclusions are problematic. Below I outline some of the main issues in the paper. 

1.	The organization of the paper and particularly the introduction is difficult to follow. Constructs are not initially defined, if at all. The case as to what is known and remaining gaps in the literature are not clearly delineated. 
2.	Partly due to the problems in organization, it is unclear exactly the focus of the paper and study. It seems the researchers have developed a new measure and are testing this new measure on the sample. This is listed as the final research goal and only reliability is examined, very briefly. The conclusions focus on this measure development as the key contribution but the introduction, methods, and results do not focus on this. Further, the description and analyses provided are not adequate. How the measure was developed, validity, reliability should all be addressed and this should be the main and first part of the analyses. A CFA is needed to determine if the divisions made are accurate and appropriate for the regular and irregular students (a better case needs to be made for these divisions in the introduction as well). Further, the only measure in a study cannot be a newly developed measure. You need another measure to compare for validity and if the measure has such a high cronbach’s alpha what justification is there to compare items within this measure? Without having a solid measure there is little that can be done with the analyses. 
3.	There are several other issues in the paper but as mentioned above, without a solid measure these would likely not be relevant until those bigger issues are addressed. Some general feedback:
a.	Proof the paper. There are places written in Spanish with the English translation below it. There are paragraphs that only have one sentence. Spacing is off throughout. 
b.	Define all your variables and constructs. What is “middle socioeconomic status?” What are regular students? 
c.	Do not introduce new terms without relating them to old terms and defining them (i.e. dropout vs desertion, “regular” v. “irregular” compared to traditional and nontraditional)
d.	Provide hypotheses with research questions. Objectives are not research questions or hypotheses. 
e.	A lot of extraneous information is included in the introduction that doesn’t seem to lend itself to the focus of the study. It confuses the reader and brings about more questions. 
f.	How were participants recruited? Who responded and who didn’t? 
g.	Was there missing data and how did you deal with it?
h.	There are places that have commas that I think should be periods in the tables. 

4.	I encourage the authors to research measurement development and to consider their goals for a  newly developed measure. 
