The Profile of a Manager in Higher Education Institution in Latin America: The Case of the EBAPE

The aim of this study is to analyze the profile of today’s manager, according to the classical management literature, working on internationalized higher education institute. This paper draws together knowledge about the manager’s profile in a corporate environment and how it can be appreciated in a higher education institute all of this taking into consideration the environment that nowadays exists in these institutions. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, with professors of the Fundacao Getulio Vargas, more specific on their Public and Business Administration School (EBAPE), which had active roles on its development, internationalization and during some point in time their management. The findings obtained where analyzed under the perspective brought by the theoretical reference framework, and, based on this approach is represented the manager whom could have a better perspective to administrate a higher education institute.

Defining student participation and empowerment in higher education

Customer participation has been studied for decades; however, it gained a postmodern perspective around the year 2000. Customers have become co-creators of personalized experiences, moving from the audience to the stage. In the educational context, students must take responsibility for their learning process and participate in the production of the service. This changing is providing opportunities and challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs) to redefine their relationship with stakeholders, especially with students. This study is based on the service dominant logic (SDL) perspective because students are assumed to take the role of co-creators of knowledge in the educational setting. The research uses adapted frameworks and concepts applied in organizational, knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) and also medical studies to advance the understanding of value co-creation in the HEI context. The current study addresses a lack of research in the higher education context focusing on defining students’ participation and students’ empowerment in higher education context. An empirical investigation was developed with traditional schools in Brazil. This investigation allowed the description of the constructs in the specific context. The description of student participation in HEIs context reflects the relevance of three dimensions – information sharing, personal interaction and responsible behavior. In the Brazilian context, responsible behavior is the weakest dimension in the construct, because the responsibilities are unbalanced between students and professors. The main reasons identified for this unbalanced relation were cultural issues and local regulation. Student empowerment was described as composed by four dimensions – meaningfulness, competence, impact and choice; however, one of them – choice – was identified as the weakest dimension, facing cultural and bureaucratic barriers for implementation in the Brazilian educational context. Moreover, interviewees spontaneously cited the idea of trust in the faculty as an important antecedent of student participation that must be considered when analyzing student participation and empowerment mechanisms. An additional contribution was the proposal of a theory-based framework for understanding the service dominant logic perspective in the HEI context, in which student participation and student empowerment were explored as mechanisms leading to positive student behavior toward institution.

The effects of accountability on higher education

This paper analyzes the effect of an accountability system in the Brazilian college market. For each discipline, colleges were assigned a grade that depended on the scores of their students on the ENC, an annual mandatory exam. Those grades were then disclosed to the public, giving applicants information about college quality. The system also established rewards and penalties based on the colleges’ grades. I find that the ENC had a substantial effect on different measures of college quality, such as faculty education and the proportion of full-time faculty. The detailed information from this unique dataset and the fact that the ENC started being required for different disciplines in different years allow me to control for time-specific effects, thus minimizing the bias caused by policy endogeneity. Indeed, I find strong evidence on the importance of controlling for time-specific effects: estimates of the impact of the ENC on college quality more than double when I do not take those effects into account. The ENC also affects positively the ratio between applicants and vacancies, and it decreases the faculty and the entering class sizes. The results suggest that its introduction fostered competition and favored colleges entering the market.

Public investment in basic education and economic growth

The main objective of this paper was to visualize the relation between government spending on basic education and the human capital accumulation process, observing the impacts of this spending on individual investments in higher education, and on economic growth. It is used an overlapping-generations model where the government tax the adult generation and spent it in basic education of the next generations. It was demonstrated that the magnitude of the marginal effect of government spending in basic education on growth crucially depends on public budget constrains. The paper explains why some countries with a lot of public investment in basic education growth at low rates. In that sense if a country has only a lot of public investment in basic education without investment in higher education it may growth at low rates because the taxation can cause distortions in the agents incentives to invest in higher education.

Three essays on education from the perspective of the economics of public setor

This work consists of three essays organized into chapters that seek to answer questions at first sight unrelated, but with one common denominator, which is the scarcity of public resources devoted to education, overall, especially in lower education. . The first chapter deals with the scarcity of resources devoted to education in a context of population aging. Two hypotheses were tested for Brazilian municipalities on the relationship between the aging of the population and educational expenditure. The first, already proven in the literature, is that there is an intergenerational conflict for resources and the increase of the share of elderly in the population reduces the educational expenditure. The second, proposed here for the first time, is that there should be reduction of competition for resources if there is a relationship of co-residence between young and old. The results indicated that an increase in the share of elderly reduces the educational expenditure per youth. But the results also illustrate that an increase in the share of elderly co-residing with youth (family arrangement more common in Latin American countries) raises the educational expenditure, which reflects a reduction of competition for resources between generations. The second chapter assesses the allocative efficiency of investments in Higher Education. Using the difference between first-year and last-year students’ scores from Enade aggregated by HEI as a product in the Stochastic Production Function, is possible to contribute with a new element in the literature aimed at estimating the production function of education. The results show that characteristics of institutions are the variables that best explain the performance of students, and that public institutions are more inefficient than the private ones. Finally, the third chapter presents evidence that the allocation of public resources in early childhood education is important for a better future school performance. In this chapter was calculated the effects of early childhood education on literacy scores of children attending the 2nd grade of elementary school. The results using OLS and propensity score matching show that students who started school at the ages to 5, 4, and 3 years had literacy scores between 12.22 and 19.54 points higher than the scores of those who began school at the ages 6 years or late. The results also suggest that the returns in terms of literacy scores diminish in relation to the number of years of early childhood education.

O ensino de administração pública : histórico e diagnóstico : reflexões sobre a formação do administrador

Aprofunda a análise e a discussão no que tange à importância da melhoria da Qualidade do Ensino de Administração nas Escolas Superiores - em especial as de Formação do Administrador Público - e sua relação com a otimização dos Serviços prestados nas Instituições de Governo. Relata as vicissitudes impostas pela Coroa Portuguesa ao sistema educacional vigente à época; retrata os posteriores esforços do já então Governo da República, no sentido da criação de Escolas e Cursos Específicos de Administração e esclarece a luta politica e as incompreensões que foram vencidas para que se aceitasse a existência de um profissional de Administração no concerto das demais profissões que hoje atuam no mercado. Discorre sobre o atual processo de formação de administradores, perscruta os meandros didático-pedagógicos dos cursos hora ministrados e sugere mudanças genotípicas na condução dos misteres universitários, no que concerne à formação ética e profissional do Administrador Público, sugerindo a adoção de novos paradigmas de eficiência e eficácia nos serviços públicos. Apresenta reflexões quanto ao papel que a Universidade deverá assumir diante da comunidade científica mundial e quanto as soluções técnicas que poderão concorrer parar a instrução de um novo patamar didático-pedagógico no que respeita à utilização do saber científico na solução dos anseios sociais.

O sentido do estudo para os alunos de graduação em administração e as percepções dos agentes envolvidos nesse processo

O censo da educação superior de 2009 mostrou que o curso de Administração é o maior curso de graduação em número de matrículas no país. Somados os cursos presenciais e a distância são 1.102.579 alunos matriculados (18,5% do total). Além disso, o número de matrículas no curso de Administração cresceu 51% entre 2005 e 2009. Devido à representatividade do curso, não se pode desprezar o sentido do estudo para os alunos que buscam o título de bacharel em Administração. Também não pode ser desprezada a congruência entre o significado atribuído ao curso por esses alunos e os objetivos dos agentes envolvidos no planejamento e na execução desses cursos. Essas agentes são: o governo federal, representado pelo Ministério da Educação e Cultura (MEC); o órgão de classe, representado em nível estadual pelo Conselho Regional de Administração do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (CRA-RJ); as instituições de ensino superior (IES); os Coordenadores dos cursos de Administração; os Professores; e, finalmente, os Alunos. Sabendo que cada um desses agentes tem seus próprios objetivos e interesses e pensando no aluno como destinatário das políticas e práticas de todos os envolvidos no processo, busca-se, no presente estudo responder à seguinte questão: Qual o sentido do estudo para o aluno de graduação em Administração do Estado do Rio de Janeiro e as percepções dos agentes envolvidos nesse processo? A pesquisa de campo foi realizada em instituições de ensino superior do estado do Rio de Janeiro que disponibilizam cursos de graduação em Administração. Foram entrevistados nove coordenadores de curso, 17 professores e 58 alunos, totalizando 84 entrevistados. As entrevistas foram transcritas e submetidas à análise de conteúdo. O estudo conclui que o sentido atribuído ao curso pelos estudantes é o da empregabilidade e os agentes envolvidos na formação do administrador, em sua maioria, a ele vêm se adaptando quando deveriam provocar e oferecer um sentido mais amplo ao curso.