2.5: Brazilian Higher Education

Alex Usher (AU): Hello. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.

Brazil’s higher education system is a lot like the country itself. Big. Complicated. Riddled with inequality. And above all – still growing fast. In some ways it’s a fun-house mirror of the American system. It’s highly stratified, but the prestigious institutions for the most part are public and free rather than private and expensive. There’s a huge chunk of the system which is access-driven, but it is private and (relatively) expensive rather than public and relatively cheap. And this basic structure for the most part enjoys support across the political spectrum – or, at least, it’s not something that any political party is aiming to change any time soon.

Where political parties do clash in Brazil – quite noisily in recent years – is over the internal politics of the prestigious public higher education institutions. Under the Jair Bolsonaro administration from 2018 to 2022, Brazil had a highly Trumpist and anti-vax President, and like ever right-wing populist from Budapest to Miami, his government was often engaged in fights with universities over curriculum, program choices and funding. Lula da Silva’s new government has brought an improvement in tone, but it’s not clear how much of the damage can be undone.

Today our guest is Professor Marcelo Knobel. He is a highly respected Physicist and Science Educator. He also holds the rare distinction of having been a rector both at one of Brazil’s top public universities, Universidade Estadual de Campinas or UNICAMP and also at a rising private university, the Insper Institute of Education and Research in Sao Paolo. And that makes him a fantastically knowledgeable guide to the growth, structure and politics of higher education in Brazil.

Now, I often throw guests an easy question about the future of higher education in their country, and maybe the most striking thing about this interview is the degree of pessimism in Marcelo’s response. Normally, guests can come up with reasons for optimism: but Marcelo thinks that political polarization in Brazil may have reached the point where strong political leadership on higher education is now impossible. It’s a sobering thought not just for Brazil but for all other countries facing similar political configurations.

But enough from me. Here’s Marcelo.

Alex Usher (AU): Marcelo, can we just start by describing the system of public higher education in Brazil? Tell me where I'm wrong, but there's several hundred universities or university-colleges reporting to either a state government or the federal government. Is that correct?

Marcelo Knobel (MK): Yes, well, the system is rather complex. In fact, we have now about nine million students enrolled in the system. I would say that there is basically one system which is the public university system, which is comprised by federal universities, state universities, as well as a few city universities that are very small, and the private system, on the other hand, that has the huge number of enrollments in the country.

AU: And at the top of that system, there are some very high-quality institutions, you know, maybe the best in Latin America. As I understand it, those top institutions are nearly all funded by the federal government, not the states. Is that right?

MK: Yes, indeed we have this specific system, which is the system of the public universities, which are research oriented. Therefore, they have developed a very well-known and very solid system for graduate education as well. This system is basically the ones that perform any scientific research in the country. This is a particular way to see that. In the last few years, there has been also development in another sector of universities, which what we call here “the community universities” which usually have some religious background and are this kind of university which are private, but not-for-profit. There is a rather interesting, a new system of private universities trying to develop some research as well. But basically, we have science institutes, which are usually from the government, from the states or from the federal system, as well as the public universities, which are essentially the ones that perform science research in Brazil.

AU: Now these top institutions, there's no tuition there. It's free tuition, as I understand, but the entrance examinations are highly competitive. I remember a couple of decades ago, the system came under a fair bit of criticism because the competitive entrance examinations meant that lower income students had difficulty accessing the top universities. Is that still true? Has anything changed?

MK: In fact, it's partially true. In the last few years, I would say after 2000-2005, there has been a number of affirmative actions and social inclusion programs in all the public universities in Brazil. But indeed, there are extremely selective institutions, just to mention one single example, the university I am come from the University of Campinas in the state of São Paulo in Brazil, which is a state university. We usually have in our entrance exam, typically 80,000-70,000 applicants for 3000 places. So, it means that we have less than 4% of the students getting into the university. For some specific areas, this is more extreme. Just to mention a medicine, for example, which is career that is very much appreciated here in Brazil. In at UNICAMP, at my university, we have around 300 candidates per spot, so they are extremely selective, but this changed. We have offered a number of social inclusion programs. We have now a quota system, we have places for students that come from poor backgrounds and schools which are also public schools in high school. So, there are a number of actions that happened in the last few years in order to try to change this elitism in the public universities that was indeed happening.

AU: Now I understand in Brazil that universities are led by rectors and these rectors are appointed by politicians but that the politicians have to choose from a list of candidates that are voted on by the campus community. So, there's a mix of accountability to politicians and accountability to the academic community. Now, you were a university president at UNICAP at Campinas which is one of the top, if not the top, university in Brazil, particularly in science and technology. What kind of a campaign did you have to run to become a rector? How does having to have an elective base constrain you once you are leading a university?

MK: Well, that's a very interesting question. In fact, whenever I tell my friends in other parts of the world, the system is rather particular here in not only Brazil, but I would say in all Latin America. Indeed, there is a kind of a consultancy for the academic communities and election. In our case, in the case of University of Campinas, we have around 50,000 people voting. So, all the students, the staff members, all the internal community of the university votes. I had to make a full campaign. I did a six-month campaign. I had supporters and people helping to develop the program. We went to every single center and place at the university, every single school discussing with the faculty members, with the students, with the staff members, and at the hospital that we have a university hospital as well. So, there is a full campaign trying to understand the problems in the one hand and on the other hand, to try to figure out ways to solve the problems that eventually happen. So, I think this has two sides. On one side this can lead indeed for some populism and some corporate activists as well. But on the other hand, you get acquainted and you really understand the deeply the university, you get to know all the community, and therefore you start as a leader in a position where you really understand the whole university and the set of problems that eventually one has to face.

AU: One of the biggest trends in Brazilian higher education over the last few decades has been the growth of the private sector, which now, I think, teaches between about 2/3rd to 3/4th of all students. Interestingly, this policy seems to have pan-partisan support. It's continued regardless of the stripe of the government of the day. Why does this policy of leaving so much of higher education to the private sector have so much implicit political support? I mean, particularly on the left? How successful have these institutions been at finding ways to make higher education affordable to a lower income audience?

MK: This is a really complex question to reply in few minutes, but indeed we have this system that the government helps the students which are poorer to get into universities and a way that was found to solve the issue of places in public university was to finance these students in private universities and therefore the private system grew very much. Indeed, as you mentioned, it's more than that nowadays, 77% of the enrollments are in private universities and this is a figure that is probably not changing. The issue is that when you have a majority of students in one system, it's very hard to change because you have millions of students to deal with and it's extremely expensive to expand the public system. In Brazil, we have, by constitution, that the public universities have to deal with the three pillars of the university, which are research, teaching, of course, and extension that we call here. So, it's more like outreach programs and this is mandatory for all universities. Therefore, creating a system of research, public universities is extremely complicated, extremely expensive. Therefore, this was a way to try to expand the number of places in universities. Of course, the problem is that many of these universities are really bad quality ones. They are more certificate-giving institutions and it's very hard to get really a quality assurance in order to get good quality education.

AU: So that's interesting. You talk about low quality providers in the private section, but there is sort of a new element in the private sector recently, it seems to me. There have always been private institutions, maybe traditional prestigious Catholic ones, that have had some tradition of being knowledge generators rather than just low-cost providers. But now you are getting some new ones like Insper, where you were briefly president. They sort of seem that they're building themselves on the model of Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. So, both private, but innovative and there's a fair bit of research coming out. What is this new breed of universities? How did they come about and are they succeeding in their ambitions?

MK: Well, indeed, there is this new system that is developing, I think it's good enough to have that because we really in Brazil, one figure that I forgot to mention before is that even though we have 9 million students in the system these students represent only 20 percent of the cohort from 18 to 24 years old. So, we have to double these numbers in order to reach the percentage of other developed nations. So, we really need to expand this system. We really need diversity, and this new group of universities and higher education institutions is growing. I think it's an interesting result of the system trying to find new niches in order to develop. One of the causes is also related to the affirmative actions and social inclusion programs that happened in the public universities. Of course, for the elite of the country, there has been less places in the public system and therefore this all there's a system of elite private universities grew. I think it's very good for the system to have this diversity. There is a space for more. So, I think we will yet see a change in the system in the next few years.

AU: Marcello, let me turn now to more recent events. There was a shock winner of the 2018 presidential election in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, a man very definitely in the mode of Donald Trump. What were the implications of his election for the higher education sector? Was there a frontal assault on higher education or was it more benign neglect for four years?

MK: No, there was a direct assault. There was immediately a change in the way the universities and the higher education system is seen. In fact, there were direct attacks from the ministers of education to the higher education system itself. There was a huge drop on the funding for universities, for funding for science, and for funding for infrastructure as well. So, there was not only verbal attacks saying that the universities are a place for leftists, it's where nobody does anything, there are only parties. But also, they really did reduce the budget for all the federal universities, and there were many attacks in different fronts. Just to mention an example that we discussed it before, after the election of the names at the public universities, usually, in the federal case, the president usually nominates the first on the list, but Bolsonaro changed that. He nominated many rectors that were not the first on the list, or even they were not even in the list. This produced a strong conflict within the universities and it was really hard to deal with and we are still dealing with this problem up to now. So, this is something that we should take care and be aware because from the politics and this strong polarization can really make a damage in the higher education system.

AU: In some countries, if you had a government that was cutting back funding, the institutions would be able to recoup some of that through tuition fees, but that wouldn't have been the case at the federal universities in Brazil. So, what were the implications for institutions? Were there layoffs? How did the budget cuts play out?

MK: Well, in fact, the issue is that the salaries of the faculty and the staff was not affected because this goes directly through the federal governmental system. So, this was kind of a relief, but the universities had no sometimes had no money to even to buy toilet paper for the restrooms or to pay the energy for the buildings. So, this was really disastrous. Many necessary materials for research, the cleaning of the places and so on. This was really bad for the universities. And of course, not only the practical things, but the mood as a whole was affected. So, there was this bad mood regarding the future. Therefore, it's hard to attract new talent for applying to become a professor at the university. Many people left the country. So, there was a huge brain drain from Brazil. So, this is a set of problems that were developed from these attacks to public universities in Brazil.

AU: Then late last year, I guess it's almost a year ago now, former President Lula da Silva was re-elected and in his previous term in office, which was eight years long at the beginning of the century you know, he was very generous to poor students in creating or incentivizing the creation of bursaries. You mentioned a few of those earlier as measures to improve access to the top universities. But there's a lot less money available to the government in Brazil than there was 15 years ago, at the height of the oil and commodities boom. What do you think higher education institutions can expect from Lula 2. 0?

MK: Well, of course, there was a lot of hope for the return to some money, a budget, and support for science and higher education. I usually use the analogy we at least left the survival mode that we were in during the four years of Bolsonaro, but of course there is a cautious hope because we know that it will be difficult to change. The economic crisis is stronger in Brazil now. The world is changing as well. Therefore, this is not the same situation as we face it as some years ago. And this is something that, is challenging because I'm afraid that we will soon start to have some strikes, some problems in the public system. This, of course, will destabilize the government a little bit. This is not good because as we all know nowadays, this polarization is extremely strong in many countries, not only in North America, just to mention one example, but also in Europe, in other parts of the world. And this critical governance which are complex to science technology for education as a whole are unfortunately really dominating the world nowadays.

AU: From your perspective what are the parts of the current higher education landscape that you think are the brightest? Are there any particular points of pride or hope?

MK: Well, I think that we should try to develop more. Something that we just learned from the pandemic we are now doing this interview; I am in Brazil and you are somewhere in the world. I don't even know where you are and it doesn't matter. We should try to make more connections and networks among higher education institutions in order to have more professors from different parts of the world, students exchanging experiences and ideas. It seems amazing. Before the pandemic, we didn't even know that we could do that. Now we are sure that we can do it, and it works, and we should try to do it more frequently. I think this is a great opportunity that, unfortunately it's not being developed so much yet. I also believe that we can explore in positive ways the new tools. Everyone is afraid of the artificial intelligence, but I think that the possibilities it brings for interesting developments in science, technology, and innovation is amazing. We should try to extract more from these tools and not only keep complaining about them.

AU: What do you think of the overall future of Brazilian higher education, the system as a whole? If we could travel 10 years into the future, will it be a happy future? What will have changed the most?

MK: Well, I can reply with my pessimistic side. I would say that nothing will change and it's a pity. We lose the opportunity of this, our demographic change that we are facing right now, not only in Brazil, but also in the world. Unfortunately, the system is big enough and difficult to change. We should have a system which is more diverse where we can have less restraints in order to have a student exchange, different kinds of institutions, a system which is more flexible, and of course bigger as well, trying to have access and development for more students. But unfortunately, I am a little bit pessimistic. It's really hard to change. We need a strong government in order to make and process those changes. Unfortunately, the future seems to be rather complicated in order to have this strong polarization in the society and therefore we will always have weak governments and which will not be able to deal with fundamental changes that are necessary for the higher education system. So, unfortunately, I am a bit pessimistic about that and I think that the changes that will eventually happen will be just incremental and will take a long time to develop.

AU: Marcelo, thank you very much indeed.

MK: Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

AU: It remains for me to thank our excellent producers Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan,and you, the listener, for joining us today. If you have any questions or suggestions for future podcasts, please get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be Ernest Aryeetey, former President of the University of Ghana and currently Secretary General of the African Research Universities Alliance.