Socioeconomic status and higher education: calculation and applications

Abstract: The goals of this research were to: a) develop a measure of socioeconomic status for higher education, based on the technique of Item Response Theory; b) illustrate the application of the socioeconomic status indicator analyzing the Federal University of OuroPreto (UFOP); c) analyze and compare the socioeconomic status of UFOP’s undergraduate courses and institutes.We used data from the National Exam of Upper Secondary Education (ENEM) of 1.210 UFOP’s freshmen in 31 undergraduate courses on the first semester of 2013. We used the Item Response Theory, more specifically the graded response model. Highlight results include: UFOP presented an expressive percentage of students in the lower strata of socioeconomic status; a large discrepancy when comparing UFOP’s undergraduate courses and institutes; students who used affirmative action in SISU for entry into UFOP have lower median socioeconomic status compared to students who did not use affirmative action (empirical evidence that quotas are fulfilling a social inclusion function); the importance of using educational indicators such as socioeconomic status to enable the institution to adequately plan and monitor their educational management policies.

Key words:
Socioeconomic status; Item response theory; Higher education