This thesis analyzes the evaluation process of the National Student Assistance Program (PNAES) in federal universities in the Northeast Region of Brazil, which aims to ensure conditions for student retention in federal public higher education, adopting the period between 2020 and 2024 as its temporal framework. Although the program was enacted into law in 2024 (Law No. 14,914/2024), this thesis, due to the established chronological scope, is grounded in the regulatory framework of Decree No. 7,234/2010. Even though student assistance constitutes a historical demand of social movements, its institutionalization as a right occurred within the context of the counter-reform of higher education starting in the 2000s—a period marked by the intensification of neoliberal ideology in Brazil, whose insertion into global capitalism is configured as dependent and subordinate. In this scenario, the realization of the right to education develops in a contradictory manner, intersected by dynamics of commodification and privatization, with particularities according to the regional dimension. As a complex integral to this totality, PNAES materializes under a productivist, selective, and targeted logic, shaping the profile of evaluative conceptions and practices. Grounded in the historical-dialectical materialist method, this investigation builds on the assumption that the evaluation of PNAES has been reduced to a bureaucratic and merely technical rite. This hegemonic approach depoliticizes the evaluation process and masks the contradictions between State and society within the bourgeois order, subordinating it to budgetary control to the detriment of the consolidation of rights and the strengthening of citizenship. In opposition, this study argues for the relevance of evaluation as a constitutive dimension of the social policy cycle, capable of strengthening democratic management, social control, the legitimization of institutional programs and projects, and the enhancement of state intervention in response to the expressions of the social question. Characterized as qualitative, bibliographical, and documentary research, this investigation aims to analyze the evaluation of PNAES in federal universities in the Northeast, capturing the hegemonic conceptions, intentionalities, technical arrangements, and mechanisms of participation of the actors involved in the policy. The findings reveal that, although evaluation is part of the discourse and normative mandates of these institutions, its implementation suffers from conceptual and methodological weaknesses. When conducted, it is predominantly limited to assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of actions, failing to measure their real impacts and social transformations. By highlighting these limits and contradictions, this thesis aims to provide insights to strengthen the theoretical-methodological, technical-operative, and ethical-political dimensions of Social Work and university public management.