The higher education system in Brazil has known great changes and displacements since the Nineties of the past millennium. Our national education law, more flexible than previously, fixed moderated standards to open higher education institutions. At the same time, the educational policies put all the trust in the institutional evaluation and in the performance of the students as form of regulation. The public character of these evaluations and the market would show the institution´s quality. So between 1998 and 2004, the increase of the private institutions was enormous. Even a new law of evaluation wasn´t able to stop this process. Later legislation tried to regulate this process, since private institutions moved toward oligopolization and opened their capital to stock market investment, resulting in huge conglomerates, more financial than educational in nature. Meanwhile, a modest expansion of public education and governmental support for the occupation of places in the private sector occurred. The impact on the strengthening of knowledge and practices which sustain the principles established in the legislation is subdued by a worrisome commodification.
Higher Education in Brazil; Higher education and Private Expansion; Higher education and Oligopolization
