Student dropout is a universal social phenomenon, and several definitions are used to analyse it. In our paper, the term refers to those who have not completed Greece’s 11-year compulsory education. Our purpose is to investigate the consequences of student dropout in Ilia, Western Greece, a region which traditionally has very high dropout rates. We investigate how those who drop out perceive, live, and make sense of the consequences of not completing compulsory education. We conducted 64 semi-structured interviews in 2018 and 2019 with people aged 17–50 who had abandoned primary or low secondary school between 1980 and 2015. The sampling technique used was ‘theoretical sampling’. The inductive categorization system consists of 6 categories and 15 subcategories. We concluded that not completing compulsory education has consequences for most people that are not limited to the professional field, although some of them do state that they do not experience negative consequences. An integrated educational policy on student dropout must also consider this dimension.
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