The Secretariat for Economic Development (SDE) has just launched a data repository that could be decisive in planning higher education in the State of São Paulo.
Called the São Paulo Higher Education Observatory, the tool makes it possible to visualize the distribution of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in São Paulo across the 16 administrative regions and 645 municipalities in the State.
In addition to providing detailed data about HEIs, the platform allows data to be correlated with demographic density, which appears in numerical and graphical language and through maps. The mechanism also makes it possible to evaluate the reality of institutions in the national context and, therefore, offers support for decision-making regarding state public higher education.
The platform was created by the Higher Education Coordination (CES) and built based on census data from the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (Inep), linked to the Ministry of Education (MEC). The access link is https://www.observatorioensinosuperior.sp.gov.br.
The Paulista Higher Education Observatory was created according to the concept of dynamic diagnostic maps, which bring together graphic, cartographic and georeferenced representation. In this way, the representations appear at different territorial levels, according to the user's interest, in a given school, on the map of the State of São Paulo, according to administrative regions and municipalities.
This platform allows the user to navigate logically, according to the variables chosen in filters, with the crossing of information between them, such as the number of HEIs, number of vacancies, enrollments, relationship between vacancies and inhabitants, between enrollments and inhabitants and the location of HEI.
Version 1.0 (2022) was presented last Wednesday morning (21) to the undergraduate deans or their representatives in the case of the University of São Paulo (USP), the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) and Unicamp, at the president of the Virtual University of the State of São Paulo (Univesp), the teaching director of the Paula Souza Center and the teaching directors of the Faculty of Medicine and Nursing of Marília (Famema) and the Faculty of Medicine of São José do Rio Preto (Famerp ), via videoconference led by Sandro Roberto Valentini, coordinator of Higher Education at SDE and full professor at Unesp, who is heading the project.
For the next versions of the tool, managers have already suggested new correlations that will be of great importance for searching for specific data.
Development
The platform took a year and a half to develop and, from now on, Prodesp – Data Processing Company of the State of São Paulo, a state government company – will process the data. “This is the first platform that highlights the seven pieces of equipment maintained by the government of the State of São Paulo”, explained Valentini. “It is the first that allows evaluating the distribution of places or enrollments taking into account the number of inhabitants, important information when defining policies for expanding the education system in the State, and it is the only one that allows the geolocation of institutions”, he added.
According to Valentini, there are already similar data analysis platforms, but, taking into account the characteristics described above, the São Paulo Higher Education Observatory is a unique case. “We have many responsibilities in our daily lives at the Higher Education Coordination, but this project was our biggest challenge: creating this platform, which will be very important for higher education planning, and showing that the State government is very interested in what is happening in its institutions and it is seeking to bring these equipment closer together and integrate it”, added Valentini.
“The Observatory will be extremely important for undergraduate courses in the State of São Paulo as it will not only allow the organization and monitoring of interventions by HEIs in the State but will also allow it to guide proposals for improvements in basic education in the different regions”, said professor Ivan Toro, Pro-Rector of Undergraduate Studies at Unicamp.
