Educational stratification after a decade of reforms on higher education access in Brazil

Abstract

The policies Brazil has implemented in the last decade to increase social inclusion—based on both socio-economic status and race—might have reduced the educational disadvantages associated with being non-white and poor. Recent research on Latin America has found a strengthening of the association between social origin and educational attainment—at least for early educational transitions—among cohorts who grew up in the 1980s, and a weakening of the association for cohorts growing up in the 2000s. This pattern aligns with signs of declining economic inequality in the continent. However, the decline in economic inequality coupled with an unprecedented expansion of education, including higher education, would suggest a weakening of the influence of social origin on educational opportunity for multiple educational transitions, not only early transitions. The goal of this paper is to examine recent changes in educational inequality by social origin and race in Brazil. We use a unique nationally representative data set collected by ILO in 2013 from respondents age 21–29 to answer the following two questions: As Brazil achieved universal enrollment in primary education and consistently high enrollment levels in secondary education, have the effects of social origin on secondary schooling entrance, secondary schooling completion and college access changed? Has the extent of the non-white disadvantage in education declined for younger cohorts? We provide the first assessment of inequality of opportunity in late educational transitions conducted after these key changes in Brazilian educational policy. The results show that while younger cohorts enjoy more egalitarian educational opportunities relative to older cohorts, important bottlenecks linked to persistent inequalities based on both social origin and race remain, particularly for the completion of secondary schooling.