O impacto da pandemia de Covid-19 sobre o desempenho dos alunos de ensino superior no ENADE 2021

Abstract

The present work aims to evaluate the impact of the COVID­19 pandemic on the performance of undergraduate students in the National Student Performance Exam (ENADE) 2021. For this purpose, a sample of 2,369 higher education courses evaluated in the ENADE editions of 2017 and 2021, and, from this base, aggregate them for 446 municipalities in Brazil, achieving, therefore, the construction of an appropriate base for an econometric methodology of panel data. In addition to assessing the impact of the pandemic itself, including the number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants, an attempt was made to isolate its effects using socioeconomic variables widely used in the empirical literature on this area, such as family income, admission through affirmative policies, receipt of academic scholarships, dedication and ethnicity. Furthermore, the use of one more variable was proposed: the exclusive dedication of students to their undergraduate courses. For regression, the differences­indifferences estimator was used. As a result, there was a small impact of the pandemic on the performance of Brazilian higher education courses by municipality in ENADE 2021, with the ethnicity of students being a prominent factor with a negative effect on the exam. This work contributes to the identification of the immediate short­term effects of the pandemic on Brazilian higher education.