BRAZIL: Too few students to fill university seats

While universities in many countries are bemoaning the fact that they have too many students applying for too few places, Brazil has the opposite dilemma: the country has an abundance of university seats but not enough qualified students to fill them.

"We don't have enough students finishing high school and this is a major issue," said Maria Helena Guimarães de Castro, former state secretary of education of São Paolo and a retired professor of political science at the State University of Campinas.

"Our big challenge is how to get students to stay in school and we're putting an enormous amount of resources into this," she told University World News in an interview at the OECD's Institutional Management in Higher Education general conference last week.

According to Guimarães, only 35% of Brazil's pupils complete high school. Many leave way before their graduation date to enter the job market, some in order to help support their families.

Official statistics show that only about 54% of the country's 15-year-olds are in secondary institutions, which means that nearly half of this age group is already working or involved in other activities, including illicit ones. However, many do try to obtain a high school equivalency diploma by sitting certain exams later, Guimarães said.

Of the students who make it to university, about half drop out as many are ill-prepared for the demands of tertiary education.

"There's a lack of quality in primary and secondary education which has an impact on higher education," said Guimarães. "Teachers' salaries are low, and students stay an average of only four hours a day in primary school, which is not enough. Many students finish fifth grade without being literate in maths and the Portuguese language."

For a high number of low-income group families, the children are often the first generation to attend school, and their parents are unable to help them with homework or acquiring literacy and other skills.

The result of all this is that Brazil's students have consistently finished among the lowest groups on international tests for basic skills. In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the country's 15-year-olds ranked 49th out of 56 countries in a 2006 report, although this was an improvement from 2003.

The students performed especially badly in maths and science, and Brazil has woken up to the problem of how this could affect the economy in the long-term. The country has an acute shortage of technical workers, for instance, and wants to triple the number of engineers over the next few years.

Guimarães said that 360,000 technical workers will be needed for oil and gas exploration and other sectors - including sports, as Brazil will host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

To meet these requirements, the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has instituted an array of highly lauded programmes. Lula, who himself completed only fourth grade, wants the measures to ensure universal education, keep students in school, and pull more young people into university, especially those from poor communities.

Brazil has about six million students in higher education, and some 600,000 are participating in its 'pro-uni' (pro-university) programme, in which low-income students receive scholarships for university.

The government has also given tax breaks to private institutions, which make up 75% of higher education schools. In addition, it has set up quotas in some institutions for students from public high schools.

The country has thus managed to double the number of 'black and indigenous' students in higher education, but they still account for only 10% of university attendees despite making up 51% of the Brazilian population, Guimarães said.

"The selection can be very elitist," she added.

To assist parents in keeping their children in school, the Bolsa Familia (family grant) programme, a national measure of cash transfers for poor families, has also been extended. It currently has 12 million families, or about 40 million people, benefiting. It is the largest such progamme in the world, and economists say it has already contributed to poverty reduction.

"It is one of the most important steps we've taken as a nation to get people out of poverty," Guimarães told University World News.

Critics of Bolsa Familia say some recipients are only sending their children to school so that they can get the monthly grant of about $12 per child. But many academics believe these and other programmes will bear sustainable fruit.

"We need to have affirmative action," Leandro R Tessler, a Brazilian physics professor, told University World News. "The old model of accepting students to university based on their performance in entry exams is not fair or equitable."

In a paper that Tessler presented at the conference, he argued that the results of entrance exams alone "are not absolute indicators of the capacity" of candidates.

"Affirmative action policies, when enforced considering local institutional realities, can in fact improve the academic standards of Brazilian universities," Tessler said. "This is relevant for individuals, institutions and society as a whole."

As far as the conference theme, Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing more with less", is concerned, Brazil seems to be doing more to achieve more. But it still has a long way to go.