A cor local: mudanças e desigualdades no ensino superior brasileiro na segunda década do século XXI

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to map the recent transformations of the Brazilian higher education system, usually summarized by the literature with the keywords expansion and diversification, as well as adding a spatial element, including, therefore, the analysis of interiorization amongst the changes that the aforementioned system went through in the last decade. After that, it intends to connect these structural transformations with the public that attends this level of education through an analysis of the allocation of seniors between different types of educational opportunities. The literature on higher education understands that the diversification of this level of study opens new room for the reproduction of inequalities even in a context of expansion; however, analysis that detail the internal heterogeneity that makes up higher education are rare in Brazil, and, when they exist, they are done at a national (global) level – without considering, therefore, the spatial heterogeneity that can be seen by the patterns of concentration or deconcentration of educational opportunities in the country, called “educational oasis” or “deserts”. At the same time, several works exclude some important but recent innovations of the Brazilian higher education system from their analysis, such as non-traditional distance learning. In this work, therefore, I expand and update this literature by answering the following question: taking into consideration the academic and spatial diversification of the Brazilian higher education system, was there a change in the spatialization of the offer or the consumption of educational opportunities in Brazil? In order to fulfill that goal, this work maps the triple processes of expansion, diversification and interiorization of the higher education system; after which it enters the issue of the consumption of educational opportunities. It uses official data, in a first moment analyzed through indexes and maps and in a second moment by multinomial and spatial analysis and models.