Are Brazilian Higher Education Institutions Efficient in Their Graduate Activities? A Two-Stage Dynamic Data-Envelopment-Analysis Cooperative Approach

Abstract

Higher education evaluation presents itself as a worldwide trend. It aims to improve performance due to its importance for economic and personal growth. Graduate activities are essential for Brazilian research and innovation systems. However, previous studies have disregarded the importance of this educational level and have evaluated efficiency by jointly considering teaching and research or only undergraduate courses. Therefore, this study contributes to Brazilian reality by proving a national graduate activities efficiency evaluation that considers them as a two-stage system (formative and scientific production stages). The study provides three main methodological contributions by presenting a new centralized two-stage dynamic network data envelopment analysis (DNDEA) model with shared resources. Besides measuring efficiency, an efficiency decomposition based on a leader–follower assumption shows managers how much efficiency can alter when one of the stages needs to be prioritized. Finally, a new framework based on modified virtual inputs and outputs provides a bi-dimensional representation of the efficiency frontier. Results indicate the usefulness of the approach for ranking universities, and the need to improve scientific production, highlighting the negative impacts of COVID-19 on the formative process efficiency and showing no significant regional discrepancies regarding performance.