This research sought to understand the phenomenon of evasion under the modalities of abandonment and locking the enrollment of students at a community institution of higher education. In order to carry out the investigation, three instruments of analysis were used, namely: historical data of enrollments carried out, abandonment and locking of enrollment provided by the researched institution, covering the period between 1995 and 2019; the responses to a questionnaire requested from each student who chose to close the enrollment between 2014 and 2019. And, to better understand the motivations that make it difficult to stay at the university, we used a semi-structured interview with nine students who declared that they had thought about quitting the university at some point during the course. With the results, we observed that the dropout process, although inherent to higher education, not always related to students failure or abandonment. We observed that the adaptation process requires students to have a series of skills, from adjusting expectations to courses to socializing skills and looking for ways to feel that they belong to the universe of academia. The investigation leads us to the conclusion that an institution s planning regarding the adjustment of students to university life can be configured as an important factor in the decision of the incoming student between leaving or staying at the university.