Investigating the Efficacy of Brazilian Public Policies for Ethnic-Racial issues in Higher Education: The Case of Tocantins State in ENADE 2014

This paper aims to investigate the demand for public policies in the light of data science evidence, namely, from a technical perspective. In order to reach this goal, we analyzed the data set of the Brazilian government on the ENADE, the national examination of student performance, for 2014, considering socioeconomic and ethnic-racial issues. The results showed that socioeconomic factors could influence the student performance in the tests. However, from the point of view of ethnic-racial elements, it was not possible to perceive statistically significant evidences that could influence the student's performance in the ENADE exam. The result suggests that there is no differences in intellectual capacity between the race ethnicities studied.