Efficiency of brazilian federal universities

This study aims to analyze the efficiency of federal universities concerning the final products offered. For this, it analyzed 37 Brazilian federal universities, through descriptive statistics and data envelopment analysis (DEA). Delimited the year 2014 to 2016 to carry out the analyses. The importance of the investigation lies in the purpose that the analysis of university efficiency can be one of the important stimuli to increase the quality of teaching and research, as well as improve the efficiency of public resources and their allocation, resulting in the improvement of university management and consequently a better performance of higher education. Another relevant contribution is having in the set of variables that make up the final products offered for the analysis of efficiency, among other variables: scientific production and patent filings, these variables were little investigated in the analysis of efficiency in higher education. The results of the analysis showed that the smaller the human and financial resources in Brazilian federal universities, the smaller the amount of scientific production, and also revealed that more than half of the investigated universities are efficient. However, such results should be interpreted with caution, given the temporal access of the variables used in the model and different locations in some universities, it is recommended that future research investigate other variables to understand the impact on the efficiency of Brazilian federal universities.

Keywords:
efficiency; universities; college education