Qualidade percebida pelos discentes do curso de engenharia civil de IES pública e privada

Abstract

This work had as its main objective to identify and to analyze comparatively the quality perception of the students of the Course of Civil Engineering from two Higher Education Institutions (HEI), a federal public university located in Minas Gerais and a private university center located in Santa Catarina. The contribution of this research is to inform both entities what is perceived in terms of functional quality by their academics and to offer indicators for improvement, in addition to contributing to maturing of the theme in the scientific literature. A validated questionnaire was applied remotely from September to November 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic) to evaluate the following parameters of the educational services offered: market reputation, security, administrative support, interpersonal relationships, infrastructure, educational and academic aspects. Participants assessed the instrument's questions using a Likert scale from 1 to 5. Of the 213 responses received, 160 were considered valid for the study, 88 from the public university and 72 from the private HEI. In this way, the samples of both institutions were characterized, the reliability of the study was verified, descriptive treatments were carried out by dimension and the final average of each entity was found. The administrative support and infrastructure parameters had the highest and lowest averages respectively in the two organizations. The private HEI achieved numerical averages higher than the public one in all dimensions of the instrument; however, differences between averages were not statistically significant. Students from both institutions reported a perception of acceptable quality in relation to all questionnaire items, despite criticism by some of them about cafeterias and parking lots. The main limitations of the research were the non-probabilistic samples and the subjectivity of the concept of quality. We suggest that studies like this be repeated to diagnose new indicators of improvement in Brazilian Higher Education Institutions.