The biggest higher-education expansion in the history of Brazil has added campuses in dozens of cities and towns throughout this vast nation over the past few years. But for every person celebrating new classrooms in once-ignored regions, there’s another lamenting weak execution: a lack of space, a shortage of equipment, or a poorly thought-out curriculum.
The Reuni program, as it’s commonly known here, was designed to expand Brazil’s elite, free public-university system and put campuses in the poor suburbs and rural, less-developed parts of the country. The project is considered vital in a nation where severe social and economic inequality threaten to hamper the country’s rapid economic growth, and high-skilled jobs often go unfilled.
On one level, the program can claim extraordinary achievements. Since 2003 the number of towns and cities with a public-university presence has more than doubled, and the number of seats available to students has risen from 109,000 to 243,000. (About three-quarters of all college students in Brazil attend private institutions, but the public system is considered more elite.)
“This was one of the biggest successes we’ve ever had, not just in terms of execution but also in terms of size,” says Amaro Lins, Brazil’s higher-education secretary. “It has democratized higher education and taken it into the interior of Brazil where universities were not present.”
Yet Reuni has been, and continues to be, hamstrung by typically Brazilian problems, including a baffling bureaucracy and a glacial pace of construction. Some professors have been forced to conduct classes in local schools or hotels because their promised classrooms failed to materialize. Public transport to remote locations can be slow or inefficient, and there is often a lack of qualified staff and administrators. On some campuses, offices are filled with books because the library isn’t big enough.
“The implementation hasn’t been as efficient as the concept,” says Douglas Cassiano, a chemical-engineering professor who has worked at two of the new universities and monitored Reuni’s first few years up close. “There’s a disconnect between what they planned to do and what they have actually done.”
The Good With the Bad
Reuni, formally known as the Support Program for the Restructuring and Expansion of Federal Universities, began during the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. A charismatic former factory worker, Lula, as he is known, never finished high school and pledged to make life better for Brazil’s poor and disadvantaged.
In the years since Reuni started, authorities have spent 10 billion reais ($5-billion at today’s exchange rate) on building and equipping four new universities and 145 new branches of existing universities, Mr. Lins says. The number of students enrolled in public institutions has doubled, as has the number of professors.
But although there are now federal universities in Brazil’s farthest-flung corners—professors get to one campus in Amazonia by taking a nine-hour boat ride—the conditions and quality of the education they offer is hotly debated.
Some of the new institutions are among the best in Brazil, academics say. Others are among the worst.
Take the Federal University of São Paulo, or Unifesp, which embodies both the strengths and weaknesses of the program. Unifesp has added five campuses in and around São Paulo, a metropolitan area of more than 20 million people.
That has been a boon to Diadema, a hardscrabble city, bolted to the edge of São Paulo, that is home to ironworks, chemical plants, and other heavy industry. Until the Unifesp campus opened here, in 2006, the nearest public university was in São Paulo, requiring an often long and arduous commute. The new campus now enrolls 2,400 students, who can choose from among 12 programs in science and engineering, tailored to the needs of the local community.
“One of the reasons I came here was because this is a region with a lot of industry, and they will need professionals in my area,” says Elton Escobar, a third-year student in environmental sciences.
Perhaps most important, 10 percent of the students who pass the entrance exam are from Diadema rather than surrounding areas, up from 1.5 percent when the university opened. That increase suggests that the campus has gained the respect of local families, who consider it a valid alternative to studying in São Paulo.
“Today people here see the university as something close to them,” says Virginia Junqueira, the campus’s academic director.
By contrast, in Guarulhos, a large industrial suburb of São Paulo, students and professors complain about a half-finished campus with poorly thought-out academic programs. When it opened, in 2007, with undergraduate courses in philosophy, history, social sciences, and pedagogy, the branch campus was run from a building on land donated by the local mayor.
A planned expansion never got off the ground, leaving 3,000 students to cram themselves into a single building and a nearby school.
Marcos Cezar de Freitas, until recently the academic director there, blames Brazil’s convoluted construction-bidding process. The company that won the initial bid went bankrupt, wasting two years. The winner of the second bid made a proposal so unrealistic that the process was suspended.
“Students say to me, ‘Where is the refectory?’” he complains. “And I say it will take two years, and they say, ‘But I am hungry right now.’”
The lack of promised progress has caused discontent among students and instructors. Dissatisfaction is so widespread that some professors have signed a petition asking the rector to halt all building work and abandon the expansion plan.
Critics also say that the community has benefited little from the new campus. The local elementary and secondary schools are so weak that few high-school graduates are able to pass the entrance exam.
“The vast majority of students come from São Paulo because they have access to the best schools,” says Henry Burnett, a philosophy professor who has vociferously criticized the current setup. “What they lack here is education, infrastructure, health, public transport.”
Skills or Social Science?
Critics also complain about the curriculum. The Diadema campus offers programs that teach students the skills needed to work in local industry. The Guarulhos campus instead opted for a curriculum focused more on social sciences, creating, for example, one of the biggest philosophy departments in Brazil. That may make academics like Mr. Burnett happy, but, as he says, the impoverished neighborhoods surrounding the campus see little need for philosophers.
Several of the newer universities have chosen to focus on the liberal arts—still a controversial move in much of Brazil.
Herbert Toledo Martins, a professor at the Federal University of the Recôncavo da Bahia, a new institution in one of Brazil’s largest and least developed states, is a critic of degrees without a specific career focus.
“Students do four years, and when they graduate they are not psychologists, not engineers, not physiotherapists. We are fooling people into getting a diploma that is worth nothing in the job market,” says Mr. Toledo, who heads the faculty association at the university.
Students say they’re aware of the limitations of these new institutions.
“I came here because it’s a new university and I thought I’d help construct the courses. I wanted to make history,” says Natalia Menezes, a history major at the Unifesp Guarulhos. “It hasn’t worked out perfectly. I thought there would be more resources and that it would be more looked after.”
Nevertheless, many are simply happy to be getting a free education at a public university.
Despite the program’s many problems, government officials promise further expansion of the system. They say Brazil cannot afford not to act. “We are building four new universities, and we are going to create 47 new campuses,” says Mr. Lins, the higher-education secretary. “There is a still a huge demand that we need to satisfy.”