Public higher education: we need a new path – 09/30/2024 – Education

Brazil has 2,574 higher education institutions, of which 313 are public. Among the public institutions, 134 are state institutions and 119 are federal institutions. Of the federal institutions, 69 are universities. Of the private institutions, 91 are universities – the rest are isolated colleges or university centers.

Of the approximately 9 million enrollments, 7 million are in private institutions and 2 million in public institutions. While 8% of students in public entities use distance learning (EAD), in private institutions 51% of students use it.

Higher education in Brazil only serves 18% of young people between 18 and 24 years old, well below the target of 33% established for 2024 by the National Education Plan, and dropout rates are very high: 56% of students from private institutions and 39% of students at public institutions do not finish their courses.

The federal government invests around R$150 billion per year in education; 27% of this amount goes to higher education. Despite this, the most significant innovations come from private institutions. Examples are the engineering courses at Insper and Inteli, both in São Paulo, and the undergraduate programs at two social organizations, Impa Tech, in Rio de Janeiro, and Ilum Escola de Ciência, in Campinas.

Brazil does very poorly in international rankings. The best placed institution according to the “Times Higher Education Ranking”, USP (University of São Paulo), is in group 201 to 250. Unicamp (Universidade Estadual de Campinas), between 351 and 400. And the others are located in the arc from 601 to 800 (or even further back).

Brazilian universities are very large: USP has around 100 thousand students, UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) has 70 thousand, and many others (Unicamp, UFMG, UFF, UFRGS, UNB, UFP) have between 40 thousand and 50 thousand students. In the international ranking, the top five have an average of 17 thousand, and the top 20 have an average of 20 thousand students.

It is very difficult to be great and excellent, bureaucracy and corporatism suffocate Brazilian universities. But it’s worse than that: apart from the state universities in São Paulo (USP, Unicamp, Unesp and Univesp) which have an intelligent system for allocating public resources and great management autonomy, the federal universities live in poverty, with precarious facilities, unfinished works and discretionary resources (to cover all ex-salary costs) recurrently less than 10% of your budget. Furthermore, all universities, by constitutional requirement, must obey “the principle of inseparability between teaching, research and extension”.

As members of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences point out in a recent article, “in no country has the democratization of higher education occurred only through expensive research universities. Unlike our almost exclusive model of research universities, in several countries the diversification of institutions predominates : universities, colleges, community colleges, higher-level vocational or technical education institutions, among others”.

The solution is clear: create, according to a meritocratic process, guaranteeing a certain regional diversity, a smaller group of federal public research universities, which would have strong support and resources to meet their constitutional objectives, and transform the others into institutions intended primarily for teaching. top. These should have another institutional solution that would simultaneously ensure:

1. high teaching quality;
2. adequate physical facilities that attract students and facilitate learning;
3. hiring system that encouraged the presence of teachers with professional activities outside of teaching;
4. power for the organization to hire and fire teachers, ensuring dynamism and quality of teaching;
5. choice of courses in areas where there is demand from society.

This would be the best way to respond to young people’s clamor for quality teaching, flexibility and the possibility of migrating a portion of graduates to research universities.

There are other issues that must be addressed in this process, such as the need to attract foreign students and teachers, making face-to-face teaching compatible with distance learning in a hybrid system, improving the governance of public institutions, simplifying their structure and procedures and increasing influence and the power of society in its management and, finally, creation of a powerful external system for evaluating courses and graduates.

There is no way for the country to grow without quality higher education. The current model is exhausted and we will not achieve the goals of the National Education Plan without profound reforms in public education. This is one of our greatest challenges, and one of the few ways to promote the formation of citizens, social mobility and increased productivity, fair demands of Brazilian society.