Skip to content Skip to navigation

Brazil: Where free universities largely serve the wealthy (quotes Martin Carnoy)

April 8, 2015
The Atlantic
The role of K-12 education and issues of equity and access are of vital importance in Brazil. Their top universities are free to all, but second-tier colleges charge tuition.
By 
Jon Marcus

In a system comparable to that in the U.S., rich whites tend to get top spots while the other 5 million students attend for-profit colleges. Now, the government is trying to change things.

RIO DE JANEIRO—Her face and bare arms painted with the words "medicina" and "UFRJ"—her major and the acronym, in Portuguese, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro—Ana Carolina and some classmates stand on a busy street in Rio’s sunny Ipanema district as they ask for spare change.

The money isn’t for tuition; UFRJ doesn’t charge any. It’s for beer. Spurred on by upperclassmen, the 18-year-old and her body-painted friends are undergoing a kind of hazing ritual to celebrate their acceptance to the school by paying for a party.

Ana Carolina, who declined to give her last name, is one of the lucky ones among young adults in Brazil.

Federal universities, which are the only free colleges in the country, are at the top of this country’s higher-education hierarchy. They are also extraordinarily competitive in a country where there is significant and growing demand for higher education—and where the people who score at the top of the SAT-style university entrance exam are predominantly rich, white students whose parents were able to afford to send them to private high schools. So the people who can most afford to pay for their higher educations end up not only getting into the best schools, but also spending nothing on tuition. "It’s not really fair," Ana Carolina said about the privilege she enjoys. . . . 

And the rich don't only gain acceptance to the free public universities at higher rates; once there, they are more likely to major in disciplines that lead to high-paying careers, including medicine and engineering. While only 13 percent of Brazilians as a whole attend private high schools, according to [one Brazilian government agency’s] report, 89 percent of those in medical school are private high-school grads, and 75 percent are white. Many lower-income students, meanwhile, end up paying tuition to attend for-profit universities, which specialize in majors that cost less to provide—such as accounting, management and teaching—and tend to come with lower salaries. . . .

That’s similar to what’s happening, if with less attention, in the U.S., according to Martin Carnoy, a Stanford professor of education and the co-author of a new book, University Expansion in a Changing Global Economy, which looks at universities in Brazil, as well as those in its fellow emerging economies China, India, and Russia. The fastest-growing group of college-aged Americans are first-generation, low-income racial minorities often stuck in poorly performing urban high schools, according to Carnoy. If they go to college at all, they’re channeled into community colleges or second-tier colleges and universities that, as in Brazil, can limit their choices. And with the competing demands of school and work and family, reaching graduation can be a challenge. "There are smart, low-income kids who beat the odds, but very few of those poor kids manage to finish," Carnoy said.

Read the full story in the Atlantic.

Martin Carnoy is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Back to the Top