The Academic Profession in Brazil

Simon Schwartzman and Elizabeth Balbachevsky

Universidade de São Paulo

Published in Phillip G. Altabach, ed., The International Academic Profession: Portraits from 14 Countries. Princeton, NY: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1997.


 2. Higher education in Brazil

Brazil is a large and unequal country, with most of its population concentrated in the Southeast region, which includes the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, and most of the country's modern economy. The other regions are the Northeast, the country's poorest, and densely populated; the South, characterized by the descendants of European immigrants, small industry and small, technologically intensive agriculture; the North, with the demographically sparse and poor Amazon region; and the Center-West, the new frontier, with sparse population, extensive plantations, cattle, booming towns and the country's capital, Brasilia.

Brazil is also a latecomer to higher education. Its earlier institutions - schools of law, engineering and medicine - where created in the Independence period in the early 19th century, patterned on the French model of state controlled "faculties." While in Spanish America Catholic universities were established already in the 16th and 17th century, the Portuguese rulers kept higher education to their home, and the first Brazilian universities were created only in the 1930's. The notion that higher education requires permanent research and full-time professors and teachers is still more recent. Professors of law, medicine and engineering (and later pharmacy, dentistry, accounting, architecture, and so forth) were supposed to be actives in their profession, of which teaching at universities was considered a natural and prestigious extension, rather than the opposite. Employment in higher education institutions did not require more than a few hours a week, and payment was mostly symbolic.

The current framework for Brazil's higher education was established in the 1968, when an educational reform attempted to reorganize it along the American model, with the end of the traditional chairs, the creation of departments and institutes, the introduction of full-time contracts, graduate education and the credit system, and close links between teaching and research. Undergraduate education, however, maintained the European tradition of providing professional degrees after four to six years of study, with only a few and not very successful attempts to introduce one or two years of general education at the university's entrance.

In practice, the 1968 reform led to two parallel lines of development. Two public institution systems, one of the State of São Paulo and another of the Federal government, tried to follow the 1968 legislation, providing full-time employment for professors, creating graduate education programs and limiting the number of students admitted each year(3). At the same, private higher education expanded, but limited to undergraduate teaching, offering evening courses in the "soft" fields, and catering mostly to students who did not pass the entrance examinations to public institutions. Private education developed mostly in the Southeastern region, where the demand for higher education overtook by far the availability of places in public institutions (in São Paulo, only 19% of the students are enrolled in public institutions today). In the poorer regions, public institutions are still the dominant avenue for further education for the few that complete secondary school.

The 1968 reform, combined with a short period of intense investments in scientific and technological research, led to the creation of a significant scientific community, working in the main public universities and a few government research institutes. There is now a pool of about 15,000 persons with doctoral degrees, most of them working in universities, about 1,000 graduate degree programs in the universities, and public expenditures in science in technology of about two to three billion dollars a year. Articles by Brazilian authors published in the international literature are less than 1% of the world total. In 1992 Brazil ranked twentieth among nations in academic scientific production in absolute terms, trailing China, Belgium, Israel and Denmark, but ahead of Poland, Finland, Austria, Norway, Taiwan and Korea. Links between scientific research and the productive sector, however, had been weak, and the impact of science and technology on the quality of undergraduate and technical education is limited, a few significant exceptions notwithstanding. Because of its growing costs, budget limitations and uncertainty about its broader role, this scientific establishment went through a period of hardship in recent years, which is reflected in this study.. (4) Most of this competence in research and graduate education is concentrated in a few universities, such as the universities of São Paulo, Campinas, Rio de Janeiro and the Escola Paulista de Medicina.

Brazilian undergraduate education in 1991 included 1,565,056 students enrolled in 893 institutions and attended by 146,988 "teaching positions," of which 133,135 were actually fulfilled. Figures for 1989 showed 32.5 thousand students in masters and nine thousand students in doctoral degree programs. Higher education institutions range from large to very small, public or private, with research and graduate education or just undergraduate teaching(5). After a period of rapid growth in the 1970's, the system stabilized in the 1980's, when the country's economy also stagnated. Only about eight to 10% of the age cohort enroll, but still, unemployment of university degree holders is not uncommon.


Table 1. Number of institutions, enrollment, number of teachers, full-time teachers and teachers with graduate degrees, by region and legal status of institutions (educational census data)
  number of institutions % of total enrollment % of teachers % of full time teachers % with a master's or a doctor's degree
Region:
North 3.0 3.3 3.1 4.8 2.2
Northeast 11,2 15.8 16.7 22.0 15.5
Southwest 63.2 56,3 55.2 46.6 61.4
South 14.7 18,4 18.8 18.8 15.7
Center West 7,5 6,3 7.9 7.9 5.1
Total 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%
Legal Status
Federal 6.3 20.5 32.6 60.3 46.6
State 9.2 12.9 17.9 26.0 25.4
Municipal 9.4 5.3 3.7 2.0 1.4
Private 75.1 61.3 45.8 11.7 26.2
Total 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%
Total number 893 1,565,056 133,135 57,728 46,758
Source: data from the Ministério da Educação, Serviço de Estatística da Educação e Cultura, 1989.


This survey of the professorate is the first of its kind to be made in Brazil. It was carried on in 1991, in the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná. About one thousand academics answered the questionnaires, in a random, stratified sample of states, universities and academics within the universities. The subjects were selected from lists of professors provided by the administration of their institutions. It included persons with full-time and part-time contracts, and excluded those linked to research projects but not in their institutions' payroll. The questionnaires were personally delivered, and the number of refusals was very small, lower than 5%. Whenever a person could not be found, he or she would be replaced according to the same random procedure(6). The sample was intended to cover the variety of sectors, fields of knowledge, type of institutions and regions in Brazilian higher education, but at the same it over represented those institutions with higher levels of scientific productivity and larger percentage of professors with doctoral degrees.


Notes

3. Public institutions were also created by some municipalities and state governments, without, however, approaching the levels of investment and significance of the São Paulo and the Federal systems.

4. C. de Moura Castro, "Há produção científica no Brasil?", in S. Schwartzman and C. M. Castro, Pesquisa Universitária em Questão, Campinas, Ed. da UNICAMP, São Paulo, ícone Editora, Brasília, CNPq, 1986, pp. 190-224; T. Schott, Performance, Specialization and International Integration of Science in Brazil: Changes and Comparisons with Other Latin American Countries and Israel , Rio de Janeiro, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 1994; S. Schwartzman and others, Science and Technology in Brazil: A new policy for a global world, Rio de Janeiro, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 1994.

5. For an overview, see S. Schwartzman, "Brazil", in Burton R. Clark and Guy Neave, The Encyclopedia of Higher Education, Pergamon Press, vol. I, 82-92.

6. The field work was carried on by DataFolha, a research firm associated with the São Paulo newspaper Folha de São Paulo.