The objective of the Thesis is to understand how the public action of national actors involved in higher education, influenced by international organizations and articulated in political coalitions based on their beliefs and representations and through the use of technical knowledge as a political resource, contributed to a significant institutional reform of the National Higher Education Assessment System (SINAES) in 2017. An analytical model designed from the combination of elements from the Public Policy Pentagon (PPP) and Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) models of the sociological approach of public policies  analysis was used. The analysis of the data was made from official documentation of the main actors identified in the subsystem of public policy for the evaluation of higher education of Brazilian graduation, privileging the frameworks of cognitive and normative analysis. The cognitive framework to identify the actors' beliefs from their representations and reveal coalitions, and the normative framework to highlight the process of interaction between these actors in order to conform the institutional rules to their interests, as a result of their public action. After examining the data, the analytical model used showed how the public policy for evaluating undergraduate higher education is inserted in a neo-corporatist environment in which state bodies function as a mediation arena for the divergent interests of multiple actors and allowed to understand how the political coalitions that defend education as a right and education as a commodity worked in the process of reformulating SINAES. In this way, this Thesis concludes by the internalization of guidelines on the evaluation of higher education from international organizations in the reform of SINAES and that the changes were due to the public action of the coalition of essentially private actors, defenders of education as merchandise, who knew how to articulate politically, using technical knowledge as a power resource and influencing the decision-making agenda of the Ministry of Education in order to prevail its interests.