“Subordinated to the Immediate Demands of Capitalism”: Private Universities, Educational Expansion, and Social Mobilization in Brazil, 1968–99

Between 1964 and 1975, higher education in Brazil witnessed a rapid and fundamental shift: whereas over 80 percent of university students attended public institutions in 1964, by 1975, private universities accounted for over 55% of all university enrollees, even as the number of university students had increased tenfold. By the end of the 1990s, over ¾ of all university students in Brazil attended private universities.

While this shift towards private education between the late 1960s and 1990s fundamentally defined higher education and society up to the present, scholarship on universities and student movements in Brazil has overwhelmingly focused on public institutions and on state policy in shaping higher education. This paper complicates this narrative by exploring the processes and consequences of the expansion of private education.

Subject to federal policy, yet increasingly operating in a deregulated context, I argue that private universities did not just shape higher education in Brazil, but became the nexus through which neoliberal approaches to education as a commodity developed. Yet this shift also dialectically shaped students’ increasing challenges to privatization, in education and in Brazilian politics more generally, throughout the 1980s and 1990s. With the dramatic reversal from public to private education, these new universities not only offered student movements new discursive and physical arenas to challenge educational policy in Brazil; they became the centerpiece through which students in this period would offer counterhegemonic discourses on the function of education and social inequalities in Brazil that challenged the hegemonic projects of both dictatorships and democratic regimes alike. Thus, this paper uses the understudied expansion of private university education in Brazil to challenge state-centered studies and to complicate understandings of higher education’s role in Brazil. In the process, it will move beyond traditional political periodizations to explore the social transformations in higher education across political regimes.