Does distance education work? An analyses of profile, dropout and performance among Brazilians distance learners in higher education

• Autor(a) principal: Basso, Felipe da Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/96/96131/tde-19102023-094700/
• topic: Desempenho; Distance learning; Dropout; EAD; Ensino superior; Evasão; Higher education; Performance

This thesis is composed of 3 articles. In the first article our goal is to identify the main determinants of the choice of modality in higher education for Brazilian students and to compare the incidence of affirmative policies between the two modalities, using the logit model and data from ENADE. Our results indicate that age, labor, completing high school in public school, living alone or with a spouse and/or children compared to living with parents, and attend the course in a private university increases the probability of being enrolled to a distance learning course and that the incidence of affirmative policies is higher in face-to-face programs. In the second article we estimate the modality effect on the dropout rate in Brazilian higher education, using the data from Higher Education Census with OLS estimators. The results indicate that there is no impact in modality on the dropout rate. The last article aims to estimate the effect of modality on the ENADE score, using the propensity score matching method and data from ENADE. The results indicate that the distance learning students have a worse performance on the exam compared to the face-to-face students.