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An Overview of the Higher Education System in Brazil

Fabio Bento

Doctoral Research Fellow

PLU – NTNU

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An Overview of the Higher Education System in Brazil:

• History• The System Today• Assessment• Challenges

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History

Colonial Period:

• Church, state and the first Latin American universities: Iberian roots

• 15th and 16th century, organized knowledge in the hands of the Catholic Church

• First universities in Latin America were established by the Spanish Church

• No universities were allowed in Portuguese colonies

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Late 18th and 19th century

• Tension between Church and State, as royal houses and enlightened elites looked upon the achievements of other European countries seeking to bring the empirical sciences and some degree of intellectual freedom

• Elites disputed with the Jesuits the control of education institutions

• Independent countries striving to create their own higher education institutions

• In Brazil, the project to create a national university was postponed for another 100 years

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19th Century:

• Little industrial activity• Agriculture was rudimentary and organized in plantations based on

slave labor force• New cultural elite (lawyers, medical doctors, military officers,

engineers…) recruited from the children of landowners, courtiers of old colonial administrators and newly arriving immigrants.

• The association between higher education and social progress that already existed in Europe was much less obvious in Latin America

• In Brazil, social transformations that did not touch deeper roots of social backwardness and inequity; slavery persisted until 1889; predatory use of natural resources; and widespread illiteracy.

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The first universities

• The notion that the country lacked a university, and, more broadly, a national higher education system rises during the 1920s and 1930s.

• In 1931, a political pact between the Brazilian government and the Church established that all educational matters and that the University of Brazil (today Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) that was created in 1937 would be subject to the Church supervision and ruled by strict conservative principles.

• A parallel project: the state of São Paulo’s project of a state university part of a strategy aiming at political decentralization.

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The post-war years: from elite to mass higher education

• The national-developmentist State: industrialization and urbanization and expansion of working opportunities in services and in the public sector

• Expansion of a network of federal universities with at least one institution being created in each state

• São Paulo kept and expanded its state institutions• As the public sector was never big enough to accommodate the

demand, private higher education grew at a similar pace until the mid 1980s, when it started to increase its relative weight.

• Higher education in Brazil started to expand later than in other countries in the region, and under authoritarian rule.

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Table 1

Expansion of the Higher Education system: comparing the public and private sector:

Source: INEP, 1998

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Table 2:

Enrollment in Higher Education

Source: INEP, 1998

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The system reform of 1968:

• Introduced the features of the American higher education system: departments, instead of professional chairs, the credit system, instead of pre-ordained course programs; and graduate education

• The new legislation assumed that all higher education would be provided through research-based institutions and did not consider the process of expansion that was already in progress

• In practice, the result was polarization:

Public Institutions moved towards the research university model, absorbing about one third of the students.

Private Schools providing routine teaching, often of lower quality mostly in management, law and accounting, absorbing the other two thirds

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• As the system expanded, higher education provided learning opportunities not only to the children of the old elites, but also to those of foreign and rural immigrants and poor urban vicinities.

• However, income distribution remains among the world’s worst.

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The system today

• In 2004, there were 2013 higher education institutions in Brazil:(INEP 2004)

• 11,13% public (federal, state and municipal level)• 69,6% private• 18,1% belonging to sectors of the Catholic or Protestant Church

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Access to Higher Education

• The Vestibular is a competitive examination and is the primary and widespread system used by Brazilian higher education systems to select their students. The term derivates from the word "vestíbulo" that in Portuguese means entrance hall. The Vestibular is a written exam; only students who have successfully achieved a high school degree may enter the university after being approved in the Vestibular. These exams are designed independently by Brazilian universities, and are usually composed of multiple-choice questions, written questions and an essay.

• ENEM: The National Secondary Education Examination which is a yearly examination oh high school pupils conducted by the Ministry of Education. Many institutions have adopted this examination as an alternative way of selecting their students.

• Some institutions have adopted affirmative action measures as part of their selection processes.

• Gross enrollment of 21,2%, of those only 53% in the expected age cohort of 18-24.

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Degree system:• Undergraduate:

• The standard degree (Bacharelado) is awarded in most fields of arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences and normally 4 years of post-secondary studies. The option for students interested in teaching careers in secondary schools is a degree called Licenciatura which includes an additional year in lecturing courses.

• Five-years degrees are awarded in the so-called professional careers such as architecture, engineering, veterinary and law.

• Undergraduate in medicine requires six years of full-time post-secondary studies.

• Graduate:

•Masterdegree (Mestrado): 2 years including coursework and thesis

•PhD (Doutorado): 4 years including coursework and doctoral dissertation

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Assessment• The legislation grants full academic autonomy to public universities which

includes the right to create new course programs and to define the number of students admitted yearly.

• Private institutions need to be accredited to get university status and top have the same autonomy, but in practice, accreditation has historically been given without any systematic assessment.

1996:Creation of the National Assessment of Courses: a national test applied to

all students graduating in each specific course program in the country. Results were published in a scale, from A to E, according to their distribution in each field.

• New legislation made it mandatory for students to complete that if it is applied to their field in their year of graduation as a precondition to obtain the diploma.

• There is no minimum passing grade as the goal is to assess the program and not the student.

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*The Implementation of the National Assessment was carried out by the National Institute for Educational Research (INEP).

* The initial step was the establishment of assessment committees for each field of knowledge. Members were chosen from lists prepared by professional associations, scientific associations and by the Ministry of Education, balancing different geographical regions and types of institutions. * The general orientation of the exam put emphasis on the mastery of key concepts, ability to think independently and to apply knowledge to new situations.

* Students also had to fill up a questionnaire about their socioeconomic background

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• In 2002, 24 areas that concentrated about 90% of the graduates in that years were assed: Management, Law, Civil Engineering, Veterinary, Dentistry, Electric Engineering, Journalism, Language and Literature, Mathematics, Economics, Mechanical Engineering, Medicine, Agronomy, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Pharmacy, Pedagogy, Architecture, Accounting, Nursing, and History.

Impacts:

* Direct impact: minimal* Indirect impact:(Schwartzman 2007)

- Students’ choices: the demand for highly rated programs increased (by 6%)while the demand for low rated programs decreased (from 35% to 18%).

- Institutions’ awareness: 65% of the courses programs reported changes in the period, half of which attributed directly to the national assessment.

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Criticisms:• The argument that the adoption of a single, unified exam in each field

for programs led all institutions to adjust to same format and may have prevented their freedom to experiment and diversify.

• Criticism towards the way courses were ranked by uniform criteria. The public is informed about their relative position in the rank, but not if they are of good quality or substandard.

• Assessment may be measuring the cultural capital the student bring to the university, rather than value added to them by the courses.

• Looking at students’ results without considering other variables related to academic staff, structure, computer facilities and libraries was not a complete assessment but a limited one.

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2003 – The new higher education assessment: ENADE

• Change in government

• A new system supposed to rank the institutional quality of higher education establishment. The five-level ranking disappears. It’s established a new ranking combining the results of four different assessments: institutional capabilities, teaching, knowledge production process and social responsibility.

• The National Assessment of courses remains but with a different name: ENADE – National Exam of Student Achievement.

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Criticism:

• The new system is too ambitious and impossible to implement.• It is not clear whether published results refer to course

programs or to institutions as a whole.• By combining the results of the assessment of outputs with

three other assessments, supposed with the same weight, the new procedure was likely to make unclear for society the quality of the education provided in each specific course program, which may vary widely within the same institution.

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Challenges:

• National Assessment: lack of ownership

Creation of an independent body?

• Expansion with quality

Public institutions: stagnated resources

• Internationalization

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Sources:

• National Institute for Educational Research: www.inep.gov.br

• Schwartzman, Simon (2003). Universities and the Transformation of Society in Brazil. Retrieved from http://www.schwartzman.org.br/simon

• Schwartzman, Simon (2007). The National Assessment of Courses in Brazil. Retrieved from http://www.schwartzman.org.br/simon