The Increase of Brazilian Students in a Portuguese Engineering School

Abstract

In the last fifteen years, the number of Brazilian students in Portugal has shown an increase of more than 600%. This trend was firstly driven by Portuguese economic recovery, which included investments in university education and incentives for receiving foreign students, through the international student statute, established in 2014. In the same year, Portugal started to accept the Brazilian national exams (ENEM) for the university admission, increasing the educational migratory flux once a directly access was stablished. Moreover, other secondary reasons led to this increase, such as the opportunity to study and live in a safer country and the possibility of obtaining a prestigious foreign degree. Currently, Brazilian students represent more than 33% of the foreign students in Portugal. However, the Brazilian students are highly concentrated in the top 3 Portuguese universities, Coimbra, Lisbon and Porto. In the specific case of the University of Porto, 73% of the foreign students are of Brazilian origin, with the Faculty of Engineering (FEUP) representing the largest contingent. This sharp growth in a specific group of foreign students on the engineering courses has created several important educational challenges, as the Brazilian students often exhibit higher failure rates in exams and curricular units as well as increased dropout rates when compared with Portuguese students. This is due to several factors, such as differences on the educational methodology, the quality of the high-school education, cultural differences, difficulty of adaptation and other socioeconomics aspects. The present work evaluates the causes behind the limited academic success of Brazilian students and introduces the measures and methodologies applied to the Brazilian students on the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto, and on the Integrated Master’s in Mechanical Engineering (MIEM) in particular, in the pursuit of maintaining educational equality and ensuring success for all enrolled students, independently of their origin.