Assessing efficiency in higher education institutions has become a growing concern in the academic literature, especially for public universities balancing multiple objectives with limited resources. This study examines the relative efficiency of undergraduate Engineering programs at the Universidade Federal Rural do Semi-Árido (UFERSA), a Brazilian federal university, over the period from 2020 to 2025. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was applied using the output-oriented BCC model, which accounts for variable returns to scale among programs of different sizes. Thirteen Decision-Making Units (DMUs) were defined as individual undergraduate Engineering programs, using faculty size and number of enrolled students as inputs, and number of graduates and the Preliminary Course Concept (CPC), the official Brazilian quality indicator issued by the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (INEP), as outputs. Data were collected from publicly available institutional sources. The DEA model was implemented in R using the Benchmarking package. Nine of the thirteen DMUs reached a radial efficiency score of 1, but slack analysis revealed that only five are strongly efficient. The remaining four on the efficiency frontier were classified as weakly efficient due to positive input slacks, and four programs were found to be inefficient, with standardized scores between 0.75 and 0.97. Among the programs analyzed, two undergraduate Industrial Engineering programs exhibited contrasting profiles: one was weakly efficient due to significant input slacks, while the other was inefficient, requiring output expansion and regulatory quality improvement. These findings suggest that Industrial Engineering programs can benefit from process-oriented management approaches to enhance academic resource conversion. The results offer quantitative information to guide benchmarking, institutional diagnosis, and continuous improvement in Engineering program management.
Keywords
Engineering Education, Data Analysis, Academic Performance, Higher Education.