INNOVA Research Journal, ISSN 2477-9024  
Febrero, 2017). Vol. 2, No.2 pp. 123-130  
(
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33890/innova.v2.n2.2017.177  
URL: http://revistas.uide.edu.ec/index.php/innova/index  
Correo: innova@uide.edu.ec  
La educación superior en Brasil: ¿La privada es la mejor manera?  
Higher Education in Brazil: Is private the best way?  
Andrés Chávez Eras  
Universidad Internacional del Ecuador, Ecuador  
Autor para correspondencia: anchavezer@internacional.edu.ec  
Fecha de recepción: 01 de Febrero de 2016 - Fecha de aceptación: 25 de Febrero de 2017  
Resumen  
La mayoría de las mejores universidades de Brasil están financiadas con fondos públicos, pero el  
sector público de la educación superior en Brasil aportó sólo el 11,9% en 2002. Las admisiones se  
han vuelto difíciles debido a las pruebas de exasperación. Como resultado, los estudiantes miran  
al sector privado como una manera de encontrar la educación superior. Este trabajo analizará el  
crecimiento, la razón, las cuestiones de calidad y la recomendación en la Educación Superior con  
fines de lucro en Brasil.  
Palabra claves: Universidad; Educación Privada; Inigualdad  
Abstract  
The majority of the best universities in Brazil are publicly funded, but the public sector in higher  
education in Brazil contributed only 11.9% in 2002. Admissions have become difficult due to  
exhausting testing. As a result, students look into the private sector as a way to find higher  
education. This paper will analyze the growth, reason, quality issues and recommendation in For-  
Profit Higher Education in Brazil.  
Key words: For-Profit; Higher Education; Inequality  
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Introduction  
Higher Education in Brazil  
As pointed out by Schwartzman (1997, as cited in World Bank, 2002), higher education  
system in Brazil was characteristic of being static, which still holds true in recent years.  
According to World Bank (2002), the gross enrollment rate of higher education in Brazil was  
only 15% in 2001, despite having increased from under 10% in the 1980s, which was still quite  
low compared to other countries in the region (Argentina 36%; Chile 32%; Uruguay 30%;  
Venezuela, R.B. 29%), failing to keep up with the country’s growing demands for an educated  
labor force. The reasons behind the stasis include the limited provision, especially at the public  
sector due to the country’s inability to allocate enough funding to the tertiary sector, and the  
quality & competency of the secondary school graduates.  
The tertiary education provision in Brazil, based on the classification of higher education  
institutions by ownership by Johnstone (1998, as cited in World Bank, 2002), are differentiated  
as public (federal, state and municipal) and private (religious, entrepreneurial and proprietary).  
The private religious institutions are traditional private universities with ethos similar to public  
universities, and are mainly non-profit, the most prominent of which are Catholic universities,  
known as PUCs (McCowan, 2007). In sharp contrast to religious private HE institutions,  
entrepreneurial ones are new and highly commercialized non-profit institutions, taking advantage  
of non-profit tax advantages, while proprietary private HE institutions are purely for-profit and  
recently legalized, but without tax advantages. Based on the classification by institutional type  
(Johnstone, 1998, as cited in World Bank, 2002), the tertiary education provision is differentiated  
as universities (universities with doctoral training and faculty scholarship and teaching  
universities) and non-universities (single-faculty institutions and multiple faculties’ institutions).  
Issues & Questions  
The predominant issue within Brazil higher education system is inequality, which also  
characterizes the country’s income distribution with its high Gini coefficient of 54.7% (World  
Bank Data, 2009), despite Brazil being an upper middle-income economy. The inequality is  
pretty dramatic, when looking at the composition of enrollment by ownership. The majority of  
the best universities are publicly funded, but the public sector in higher education in Brazil  
contributed only 11.9% in 2002 (Siqueira, 2009), since the entrance to these public universities is  
based on the highly competitive examination known as vestibular, therefore excluding graduates  
from secondary schools of lower quality or those without attending an expensive preparatory  
course know as pré-vestibular, which is largely dependent on the socio-economic backgrounds of  
the students. As a result, to meet the excessive demand of higher education in Brazil, there has  
witnessed the dramatic growth of the for-profit sector, which has offered the mass or lower  
socio-economic group additional alternatives to public and not-for-profit private universities. It is  
ironic that in Brazil, majority of those going to the public universities for free and enjoying  
public benefits are the ones having attended expensive private basic education, while majority of  
those ending up in private fee-paying institutions are the ones having gone through the public  
basic education of poorer quality. Also, in terms of type of higher education provision, most of  
the public institutions are universities, while most of the for-profit private institutions fall in the  
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type of single faculty non-universities (McCowan, 2004). Furthermore, within the private sector,  
inequalities are reproduced, by means of quality of education and consequent value of diploma in  
the labor market, in proportion to the amount they can spend on tuition, which means the poorer  
and in more need receives the worse. In fact, the expansion in higher education in Brazil mainly  
occurs in the for-profit sectors, catering to the students from middle and lower income families,  
which means that the overall higher education expansion in Brazil is an inequitable one.  
Since the public sector cannot fulfill the growing demands of students accessing higher  
education, the lower cost private for-profit higher education is kind of better than none at all.  
Also due to the inability of Brazilian government to regulate educational financing and to ensure  
equality in higher education, there is no way that the state could effectively intervene the private  
for-profit sector to ensure its expansion with equity (McCowan, 2007). The research question for  
this paper is: Under the inequitable expansion of higher education system in Brazil, what efforts  
and how could the private for-profit higher education institutions do to improve their quality and  
elevate the value of their diploma in the labor market?  
This paper will examine the growth of private for-profit higher education in Brazil and  
explore the motives towards such growth, as well as issues in the private for-profit higher  
education in terms of quality and value of diploma, to rethink the role of the private for-profit  
sector could play in higher education system in Brazil. This study will, therefore, contribute to  
the debates on the quality improvement of higher education system in Latin America.  
The Growth of the Private For-Profit Higher Education in Brazil  
As stated before, Brazilian education system is far from meeting its demands for higher  
education, so the HE expansion mainly takes the forms of growth in the number and size of  
private sector, rather than the increase in the private funding to the public universities, such as  
tuition fees, which is more dominant in the developed countries (Levy, 1986).  
As a result of higher education expansion, there has witnessed a tremendous growth in  
private sector in Brazil in recent years. According to Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas  
Educacionais (INEP) (2003), the provision in enrollment in the public sector has increased by  
2
8% since 1998, but there has witnessed a notable 133% rise in the private sector during the  
same period. Also, according to 2002 Census of the Education Ministry (Ribeiro, 2005), about  
3.5% of Brazil's college students were enrolled in private institutions, and a new private college  
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was being opened every six hours. Within the private sector, until recently, there have been a  
high percentage of students in traditional private universities, mainly religious Catholic  
Universities known as PUCs, which are high-quality universities with both research and  
instruction, such as PUC Rio and PUC Sao Paulo (McCowan, 2007). However, this rapid growth  
has occurred more in the for-profit or profit-making non-profit institutions to satisfy the demands  
of large majority of people who are unable to be admitted into the public universities with low  
cost since the 1990s. Among the 905 private higher education institutions, the majority of 79 %  
are for-profit HE institutions with single faculty, while PUCs account for only 9% (83  
institutions) (World Bank, 2002). What is astonishing is that six of the ten largest universities in  
Brazil are now private (INEP, 2003).  
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Since many of the private higher education institutions are for-profit, or highly  
commercialized non-for-profit, many of them belong to the major business groups. For example,  
UniverCidade (sic), which is a university center based in Rio de Janeiro, having the autonomy  
without the interference from the Ministry of Education, provides courses at a 40% lower cost at  
the expense of no research and fewer qualified teaching staff, successfully owning 27,000  
students in 17 campuses through rapid expansion by means of branding in all types of media and  
convenient locations around the city (McCowan, 2007). However, the principal of UniverCidade  
(sic), Ronald Levinsohn, was notorious for manipulating and bankrupting the finance company.  
What is interesting is that recent for-profit sector player Pitꢀgoras, by cooperating with US  
education company Apollo in 2001, even involve previous Inter-American Development Bank  
Chief Education advisor, Claudio de Moura Castro in its curriculum development. Pitꢀgoras  
established its first HEI on the model of Apollo’s Phoenix University, mainly through  
standardization, which targets towards quality instruction expansion while with low cost and  
fewer high-level teachers (Rosenburg, 2002 as cited in McCowan, 2007).  
Reasons behind the Growth in Private For-Profit Sector  
There are several reasons contributing to the growth of private for-profit higher education  
in Brazil. The most obvious motive behind is the push from the demand side. Due to the growth  
of population in the age cohort for higher education, the rising enrollment in secondary education  
and the need for higher education diplomas by in the labor market, there has been tremendous  
increase in the need for higher education, not only from the students within age cohort for the  
higher education but also those workers wishing to return to the higher education institutions.  
The public sector could only address small proportion of this growing demand, since the growth  
of public sector is quite slow or static as discussed at the beginning, largely owing to the lack of  
investment and financing from the government.  
Another motive behind comes from the market of private higher education, which has  
gradually been viewed as an enticing area of investment by many of the entrepreneurs. As  
estimated by Brazilian company Ideal Invest, the margin of private higher education would reach  
US$10 billion from US$4 billion in the coming 7 years (McCowan, 2007), which kind of  
provides a strategic suggestion to the businesses on entering the education market.  
The third motive deals with the incentives at the policy levels, including tax exemption  
and cheap loans for the developing industries, mostly influenced by the multi-lateral agencies  
such as World Bank and International Monetary Fund, along with their neoliberal policy  
recommendations of Washington Consensus, which principally focuses on structural adjustment,  
shrinking of the state, privatization and supporting private enterprise and capital, etc. (Ribeiro,  
2
005). However, these policy borrowing were not undertaken voluntarily by the Brazilian  
government, but under the pressure and conditionality on receiving aid from World Bank. Since  
the 1980s, with the withdrawal of multi-lateral organization UNESCO, bilateral donor the United  
States and the United Kingdom on providing educational aid in Brazil, World Bank entered and  
has become the largest international donor on education sector in Brazil (Leher, 1999 as cited in  
McCowan, 2007). Largely dependent on the funding from World Bank to develop the education  
system, Brazil has to adopt particular policies, and the policies targeted towards tertiary sector  
include the diversion of state funding from higher to basic education, especially to the primary  
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sector, due to the high return investment in primary education and the achievement of Education  
for All and Millennium Development Goals. The compensation for the retreat of Brazilian public  
investment in the tertiary sector was realized through inviting private sectors come into play,  
rather than the diversification of funding sources of public sectors, such as charging students  
with tuition fees and funding from the private sector for services (Levy, 1986).  
The implementation of those neoliberal policies (the third reason) opens up this economic  
sector for the entrepreneurs and gives out the signal that tertiary sector is a beneficial area of  
business (the second reason). Therefore, the private sector has started to take the responsibility of  
absorbing the growing demand for higher education (the first reason), taking over the previous  
domain of the public sector. The retreating State has created economic opportunities for the  
private sector, but meanwhile has taken for granted for lack of investment in the tertiary sector.  
Quality Issues in Private For-Profit Higher Education in Brazil  
Although generally the private sector at the primary and secondary level are of high  
quality in Brazil, with the exception of traditional private religious universities, there has  
generated much concern regarding the quality of the new booming private for-profit higher  
education institutions, particularly strong among professions of law, medicine, and engineering,  
since the rapid growth particularly at the private sector resulted in the mass perception that the  
majority of tertiary education in Brazil was shifting away from the quality requirements it should  
have (Schwartzman, 2013) towards mass expansion. The quality concern has generated another  
common notion among the country, especially among political leaders and policy makers, that  
higher education sector in Brazil failed to provide the adequately educated and highly skilled  
human resource the country needed to develop its economy.  
The quality could be measured by the following indicators: programs, qualified staff,  
student-to-teacher ratio, library and ICT resources, physical and administrative infrastructure,  
intellectual autonomy, and research & enquiry oriented environment, which are in line with what  
is stated in the World Declaration on Higher Education for the 21st Century that quality in higher  
education is a multidimensional conception (UNESCO, 1998).  
The major measure of quality in higher education in Brazil is the innovative national  
assessment known as Provꢁo, introduced in 1996 and designed by advisory committees mostly  
from public institutions, which is the most transparent assessment in the country with its wide  
publicity (Schwartzman, 2013). The exam, which is undertaken yearly throughout the country,  
aims to assess the programs and institutions in which the students are enrolled, rather than  
measuring the learning outcomes of individual students (McCowan, 2007). The results of the  
Provâo for each course program are standardized and ranked on a five-point scale from the  
bottom as E to the top as A (Schwartzman, 2013). According to the Table 1 below, regarding the  
Provão scores in business administration program in 2000, private higher education institutions  
as a whole considerably performed worse than the public ones, especially federal universities in  
obtaining the top as A. Although a proportion of municipal institutions achieved the bottom, the  
overall performance was better than that of the private ones. In addition, within the private  
sector, non-profit or traditional institutions generally achieved higher than the for-profit ones,  
which indicated that the private for-profit higher education was encountering even more severe  
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quality issues. Although table 1 only displays the result of one academic field, the results is very  
representative in terms of the distribution of scales by ownership of institutions.  
Table 1 Provão scores in business administration in public and private institutions (2000)  
A
B
C
D
E
Federal  
State  
Municipal  
43.9% 19.5% 19.5% 7.3%  
9.8%  
31%  
4%  
16.7% 33.3% 11.9% 7.1%  
32% 20% 32% 12%  
Non-profit prívate 6.7%  
For-profit prívate 6.7%  
23.9% 52.5% 10.4% 6.7%  
12.5% 41.3% 24.5% 14.9%  
Source: Schwartzman & Schwartzman (2002)  
What is even more remarkable is that students of public universities from the lower socio-  
economic background (families earning less than 10 times the minimum wage) achieved higher  
on the provꢁo than students of private universities from the highest socio-economic background  
(families earning over 20 times the minimum wage) (Bori & Durham, 2000, as cited in  
McCowan, 2007). However, there are some issues with the assessment provꢁo itself as a measure  
of quality. One issue is that the assessment results fail to take into account the effects of previous  
schooling of the students, only focusing on the current academic level of the students, so it is no  
wonder that highly selective public universities perform far better on Provão than private ones.  
Another issue is that the assessment is designed by the teachers mostly from the public  
institutions, so the content of the test and the quality standards may favor the public ones.  
Another measure of quality from the student side is the completion rate, which is quite low in  
private institutions with an average of only 32%, in sharp comparison to the 50.3% in federal  
public institutions and 47.7% in public institutions (Schwartzman & Schwartzman 2002).  
In terms of the qualified teaching staff, only 12% of lecturers in private institutions have  
PhD degree, while 38.2% of lecturers in public institutions hold a PhD degree (INEP). Also,  
majority of professors in the private institutions are paid on an hourly basis and part-time  
(Ribeiro, 2005), therefore being unable to provide the benefits for students and the institution.  
Besides, the student to teacher ratio in private institutions is an average of 16.9 students per  
teacher, higher than the 12.5 students per teacher in public institutions (INEP, 2003).  
With regards to the institution facilities and infrastructure, the differences between public  
and private institutions are smaller, and variations exist within the private sector, which is largely  
dependent on the funding of the private institutions. For example, Pitꢀgoras, allocate a large  
proportion of its funding on the ICT resources and curriculum materials than on teaching and  
research staff (Rosenburg, 2002 as cited in McCowan, 2007), while some private institutions  
provide the programs mainly in social sciences & humanities rather than STEM field in order to  
avoid tremendous investment in the infrastructure (Ribeiro, 2005).  
Discussions & Suggestions  
What are the possible factors accounting for the lower quality of private higher education  
institutions in Brazil? One possible factor may deal with the cost and effect. Less influenced by  
the bureaucratic inefficiency the public sector mainly suffer, the private institutions are able to  
keep the cost low but at the expense of quality with regards to the constrained spending on the  
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teaching staff, facilities, etc. The issues of lower quality of private institutions cannot be  
addressed without the discussion of financial resources principally by means of tuition fees,  
which indicates that the quality of private higher education is proportionate to the amount of  
tuition fees being paid to the institutions, therefore increasing the inequality. However, the  
promotion of privatization raised by World Bank is based on the quality improvement  
incentivized by the free and competitive private HE market, which is not the case in Brazil, since  
the higher education market in Brazil is not a competitive one; rather, it is a predetermined one  
with restricted choice based on the economic, geographic, academic or other factors. Moreover,  
the private institutions have to sacrifice a large amount of money on marketing and advertising to  
guarantee its survival (McCowan, 2007), focusing on expansion rather than quality.  
The second possible factor is the value of diploma. Once the diploma is accepted in the  
labor market, the private for-profit institution does not have to concern about its lower quality. In  
Brazil, the National Council of Education (CNE) was established in licensing the private  
institutions (Schwartzman & Schwartzman, 2002), but CNE was not strict in course regulation  
and imposition of the sanctions, along with the corruption for accrediting the license. As stated  
by Castro& Navarro (1999), after the inspection from CNE, those laboratories and libraries were  
shipped away to the new institution, which was ready to being inspected for accreditation.  
As a whole, due to the weak regulation from CNE, Brazil is encountered with great  
challenges in examining and improving the quality of the private for-profit institutions. In this  
case, the quality issues in private HE in Brazil could also be viewed as in correlation with the  
weak market mechanism and lack of internal rigorous quality control mechanism within  
education system. What’s more, the regulation of the highly commercialized non-for-profit  
private institutions is fragile, providing the profit-making private institutions with loopholes.  
Within such context, it seems difficult or kind of impossible for the private for-profit institutions  
to improve the quality of instruction themselves, even confronted with the entry of powerful  
foreign education companies. Therefore external measures might have to be taken to enforce the  
tackling of quality issues, which is mostly in the hand of the state. Future research could be  
conducted to explore what mechanisms could be employed to improve the quality of the private  
for-profit higher education institutions and elevate the value of their diploma in the labor market.  
Along with that, future research could examine what kind of policy Brazil Ministry of Education  
could borrow to enforce quality control in the private HE market. Also, at the institution level, in  
forming the partnership with foreign companies, what role the private HE in Brazil should play  
to ensure its quality and relevance to the local needs.  
Due to the language barrier, the literature available in presenting the research topic is  
limited and not comprehensive.  
Bibliography  
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