The study examines the expansion of higher education in Brazil in the last three decades, with special atention to the period covering the governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It addresses the following questions: Can you say that Brazil has produced a mass' higher education system? If so, how and whereby policies and initiatives have taken place the changes? To analyse this problem we mainly rely on the theoretical perspective developed by Martin Trow, and the statistics generated by the Census of Higher Education and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. The main line of argument turns on the transformation of higher education into a "mass system", indicating phases of growth, predominant features and policies through which have been processed the transition from system elite to mass' higher education system
higher education; elite's system; mass' system; Brazil
