Evaluation of efficiency of Brazilian federal universities: an approach through Data Envelopment Analysis

Abstract Higher education, in addition to playing a fundamental social role, has its performance intrinsically linked to the economic development of a country. The recent global crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic has had a strong impact on the educational system, such as the 8.61% reduction in the public budget allocated to education in Brazil for the year 2021 when compared to 2020 figures. This fact further aggravated an already existing scenario of dismantling public education. The identification of inefficient institutions, with problems in the allocation of public resources, is presented as an alternative to start an improvement process for the development of the public sector. This article proposes to evaluate the efficiency of Brazilian federal universities, from 2017 to 2021, through the application of performance indicators defined by the Federal Court of Auditors for Higher Education Institutions in the DEA methodology with a focus on output indicators, establish a a of the evaluated units, and to determine the efficient and the inefficient ones. Through this study, it is possible to conjecture that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the efficiency of Brazilian federal universities, which presented a reduction of 0.95% in its average between the years 2019 and 2021, in addition, another important perception is the performance of universities in the North region of the country, which has the best average efficiency coefficient among all regions.