Dois ensaios sobre educação superior no Brasil

Abstract

This research presents two papers that examine high education in Brazil. The aim of the study is to analyze the development of the high education in the country, considering recent changes in this segment and pointing the most important challenges to be overcome to achieve the full development of this sector, emphasizing the problem of the drop out of the students in this educational level. For this, the microdata of the Censo da Educação Superior (High Education Census), provided by the Instituto Nacional de Educação e Pesquisa Anísio Teixeira (INEP) are used. In the first essay it s presented a comparative analysis of the period between 1998 and 2010 that establishes the changes in the characteristics of Brazilian higher education and stands out issues such as administrative dependence and academic organization of the higher education institutions, geographic distribution, research field of the courses and enrollments in the higher education in Brazil. In this stage, descriptive statistics methods and the Hirschman-Herfindahl concentration index (HH) are used. The evidences in this analysis point that the Brazilian high education expansion in the period between 1998 and 2010 was sustained by small private institutions of higher education colleges and other kinds of small institutions. It is remarkable that the concentration of enrollments in higher education related to geographic distribution in the country has been dropping, but there is still concentration related to research field of the courses. The second essay focuses on the main challenges to develop Brazilian higher education, especially the problem of university drop out. It presents an analysis of the determinants of evasion at Brazilian college students in 2010. A probit model is used with evasion as dependent variable and individuals and institutional factors that affect evasion phenomena as explanatory variables. The results show that young students are more likely to leave the university than older students as well as female students are more likely to evade than male students. It s also observed that students of private institutions evade more than students in the public universities and that students enrolled in distance learning courses and night shift are more likely to evade. The probability of evade higher education also increases among the students that stay too much time in the college, students who don t have access to educational loan and don t participate of additional training activities.