
There exists a problem that is faced by many higher education institutions in Mexico, this problem is known as drop-out, to tackle this situation there has been done a lot of research of this topic. Following the same line of inquiry, it is presented here a study done with students that belong to the Facultad de Educación of Universidad Autonoma del Carmen-UNACAR during the autumn 2018 term. There was done a transectional and descriptive study using the data mining with the Cluster k-means technique to regroup the participants. The participants were a total of 105 students whose main characteristic was to have at least one failed course of their curricula. The instrument consisted of a questionnaire which the following objective: to identify the factors that involved the failing rate of the academic, social, family, and motivational types. The results do show that the academic factor is the most detected and being identified that the explanations of the topics by the teachers are not so clear for the students, the topics explained are not so clear, dropping-out at the middle of the term, missing classes, homework and tasks not done by the students, lack of time to study. In relation to social factors, there were identified as problematic the use of social networks and working problems reasons. Among the family factors, the findings do show that economical problems in the family is the cause, and finally the motivational factor is the lack of information that students have of the topics treated in class. Due to the diversity of factors involved in the causes of failing a course it was necessary, and optimal, the use of the data mining in order to determine those causes of that failing.