Os custos da evasão de discentes das universidades brasileiras na modalidade de ensino presencial: uma perspectiva de custos contábeis e custos econômicos

Abstract

Dropping out is one of the major problems that afflicts higher education institutions, both public and private, raising costs to those organizations, which do not end when students evade, having to absorb the costs of every dropout. However, this problem is not limited to those institutions, since students who leave also have costs, once they have given their time to a course to which they did not major, when they could be doing something else. This opportunity cost is called the economic cost of drop out. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the expenses arising from those dropouts in Brazilian universities in the traditional on-campus learning. Microdata from the 2019 Census of Higher Education by INEP and data from the National Household Sample Survey Continuous quarterly by IBGE were used. The sample was made up of 197 universities with classroom teaching, as well as 569,884 dropouts. In addition to that, formulas were developed to calculate the accounting and economic costs of evasion, besides performing the spatial analysis of costs, which was conceived by using the Moran Index and the Local Indicator of Spatial Association. Evidence shows that, in 2019, at national level, the accounting cost of drop out was BRL 19,009,688,565.96, and the economic cost was BRL 5,182,753,800.00, with an average of BRL 21,277.59 for each dropout. Regionally, the highest evasion cost was in the Southeast, whereas the lowest was in the North, and, among the federation states, São Paulo had the highest evasion cost, whereas Acre, the lowest. The two research hypotheses were confirmed, as it was found, through spatial analyzes carried out, to which, in states with higher per capita income and with more universities in their territory, there is a higher accounting and economic cost resulting from such drop out. Finally, the expansion of the analysis carried out in this study was presented as a suggestion for further research.