Network Data Envelopment Analysis (NDEA); Higher education; Quality; Management Engineering.
Evaluations in the education segment present themselves as a challenge and analyzing quality in this context is even more difficult due to the numerous criteria to be considered. The present work aims to address the quality of undergraduate courses in Brazilian higher education institutions. Currently, the Ministry of Education developed a metric called Preliminary Course Concept (CPC), which considers eight indicators and uses pre-established weights to obtain a continuous CPC value.However, the arbitrary definition of weights is a significant problem in CPC.Thus, to mitigate this limitation and provide a fairer and broader assessment for the courses, the present study proposes a new alternative for obtaining the CPC through the Network Data Envelopment Analysis (Network DEA - NDEA).The proposed approach does not require pre-defined weights and decomposes this indicator into two stages, allowing to obtain three evaluation metrics: professors, students and the course.A sample with 107 management engineering undergraduate courses was used to validate the method. The results indicate quality disparities across the Brazilian macro-regions. The methodological approach discussed will be veryhelpful for the Ministry of Education, as it allows to obtain new evaluation metrics, facilitating the development of improvement strategies for each course.