Índices de percepção da formação superior: dimensões formativas e trajetórias acadêmicas no Brasil

Abstract

This thesis investigates students’ perceptions of higher education and their relationships with academic trajectories in Brazilian higher education. The study is based on the understanding that administrative records allow the monitoring of admission, enrollment, persistence, completion, and dropout, but do not directly capture how students evaluate the formative conditions experienced throughout undergraduate education. The general objective is to construct and analyze Higher Education Perception Indices, based on the Student Questionnaire of the National Student Performance Examination, and to examine their associations with course characteristics, student composition, access and support policies, and academic trajectory indicators followed over time. The research combines information from the National Student Performance Examination and the Higher Education Census, considering bachelor’s and licentiate degree programs organized by fields of education. The construction of the indices uses exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, organizing students’ perceptions into three dimensions: course, teaching, and institutional conditions. The thesis then estimates fractional response models with a temporal structure and Mundlak parametrization, complemented by Tobit estimations, and relates the lagged average index to future changes in persistence, annual completion, and annual dropout rates. The results indicate that the indices show empirical consistency and capture differences across fields, territories, and institutional legal status. The institutional dimension concentrates relatively less favorable perceptions, while perceptions of the course are associated with student composition, the organization of provision, and access and support policies. In the temporal analysis, the most regular associations occur with persistence, whereas completion and dropout show more heterogeneous relationships. The thesis concludes that students’ perceptions, when organized into synthetic measures and linked to administrative records, provide complementary information for understanding formative inequalities and academic trajectories in Brazilian higher education.