This Doctoral Thesis is the result of research into the university trajectories of former students from the Center for Social Sciences – CCS, from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro – PUC-Rio, who attended Higher Education as scholarship holders of the University for All Program – ProUni and the narratives of strategies for overcoming the challenges of student retention in higher education. The research aims to understand the profile and analyze the university trajectory of former CCS students at PUC-Rio, PROUNI scholarship holders, in the period between 2005 and 2010, regarding institutional and personal relationships, as well as narratives of strategies adopted to overcome the challenges of student retention. In this thesis, ProUni is understood as a public affirmative action policy of the federal government that since 2005 has been promoting access to Higher Education for students from the popular classes, as this program increased the number of places in Private and Community Higher Education Institutions with the objective of promoting the democratization of the sector. The methodological procedures used in the research was to carry out interviews, using an online questionnaire with semi- structured questions, with a qualitative and quantitative approach, obtaining twelve responses from former students who entered PUC-Rio through from ProUni, in one of the CCS undergraduate courses, in the period between 2005 and 2010 and who completed their university career. An analysis of institutional documents containing data on ProUni scholarship students was carried out. As a result of the research, data analysis does not allow us to determine that, in terms of socioeconomic profile, former students come from peripheral regions, mostly from the north and south regions of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Former ProUni students bring in their narratives the perception that they were seen as strangers to the university environment by other students and professors within the university. The narratives also highlighted that personal and institutional relationships directly impacted the process of affiliation with university life, initially reverberating in a feeling of not belonging to the environment. However, former students were protagonists of their own university trajectories, as they adopted strategies to overcome the challenges of permanence and highlighted in their narratives the importance of student assistance policies and programs as fundamental support for remaining and completing higher education.