Enriquecimento do censo da educação superior para o estudo das características dos cursos de graduação do Brasil

Abstract

In Brazil, there has been a significant expansion of Higher Education Institutions (IESs) since the 1990s. In the latest Higher Education Census conducted by INEP, 2,457 IESs, 41,953 higher education courses, and 3.68 million enrollments were recorded. The data from the Higher Education Census are open and published annually by INEP. They hold a huge value as they illustrate the Brazilian academic scenario and can be studied to highlight trends and patterns. However, it is believed that the indicators and metrics of the academic scenario can be influenced by external factors to IESs, such as the social, demographic, and economic scenario. This research proposes the enrichment of the data from the Higher Education Census in order to conduct analyses on various social, economic, and demographic indicators of the country obtained from open databases. For the economic scenario, data from the General Registry of Employees and Unemployed (CAGED) were collected, and for the social scenario, data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) were collected. During the enrichment process, filtering was applied to the Computer Science courses from the Census, the computing-related economic areas from CAGED, and the cities with IESs offering Computer Science courses from IBGE. With the enriched data, a descriptive analysis of the dataset was conducted, and a series of correlations that were not possible to analyze in isolation in previous works were discussed. Among the results, it bring out that computer science courses have the second highest dropout rate among higher education courses. The analysis of the dataset enabled the identification of several strong correlations between metrics and indicators, such as average salary and dropout rate. For each of them, their possible factors were discussed, and hypotheses that can be studied in future works were suggested.