Ambition with Resistance: Affirmative Action in Brazil’s Public Universities

Abstract

Most scholars of higher education agree that Brazil has the most ambitious affirmative action policies of any country in the world. News is spreading that Brazil’s federal quota policies for affirmative action in undergraduate education, which reserve half of all seats in all courses of study at federal universities for students from Brazil’s infamously poor, and poor-serving, public high schools, are not only hugely ambitious but, as research is beginning to show, hugely effective. However, the country is not moving in a monolithic way toward greater equity in access to higher education. When one looks beyond the federal university policies, the picture becomes much more complicated. First, only 26 percent of all students in higher education in Brazil studied at public universities in 2013, while 74 percent studied in private universities, both nonprofit and for-profit. Of those in public universities, 59 percent are at federal universities, 31 percent at state universities, and 10 percent at municipal universities. Placed in the overall context of Brazilian higher education, this means that only 15.5 percent of all students study at federal universities, which is the only sector with a comprehensive affirmative action law. Therefore, the world’s most ambitious affirmative action policy applies to only a small percentage of all undergraduate students in higher education in Brazil (INEP/MEC 2013).