Quality Evaluation of the Brazilian Higher Education System: Relevance, Diversity, Equity and Effectiveness

Abstract

Over the past few years, marketisation‐focused public policies have significantly transformed higher education systems worldwide. In developing countries that do not have public universities, there has been a reduction of public financing and the expansion of private institutions. In Brazil, one of the main developing countries in the world context, such changes caused a rapid quantitative expansion in the number of students registered. However, the impact of such policies on the quality of the higher education system in the country is still unknown. There are questions about the real quality of higher education and about the effects of the markets in the improvement of the system quality. This paper describes a study of the development of the quality in the Brazilian higher education system, from 1994 to 2003, which was elaborated from a conceptual model of quality and from an international performance‐indicator system. The results of this study indicate that marketisation policies in developing countries did not promote an improvement of the quality or the maximisation of the social benefits of higher education. In the period studied, no clear evidence of improvement in relevance, diversity, equity and effectiveness were found in the Brazilian higher education system.