“Diploma factories” or democratic institutions?: Analyzing the missions and democratic contributions of different types of universities in Minas Gerais, Brazil

• In Event: Higher education’s resistance of new authoritarianism, hegemony, and the erosion of democracy

Proposal

In 2019, João Carlos Salles, the rector of the Federal University of Bahia – a public institution in northeastern Brazil – stated: “The position of students plays an important role in the democratic life of our country. Listening to them, knowing about their mobilization has always been an important sign for our country to avoid a setback [to authoritarianism]” (Globo, 2019). Brazil’s public university students, like those in many contexts across Latin America, are associated with a strong tradition of democratic participation. Yet, a growing majority of Brazilian students are today enrolled at private for-profit HEIs. Little is known about whether such institutions, their leaders, and students contribute to the “democratic life” of Brazil. This paper uses content analysis to analyze the mission statements of a random selection of public, private non-profit, and for-profit universities in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais – which contains one of the country’s most diverse collection of HEIs – to discern whether these different types of institutions commit themselves to democratic education and preparing students for engaged citizenship. This paper is relevant as enrollment at for-profit institutions rapidly grows and during a period of democratic fragility after the authoritarian flavor of the Jair Bolsonaro administration and an attempted coup to overthrow the 2022 presidential election on January 8, 2023.

A comparative latecomer in developing its higher education sector, Brazil’s first federal universities – public institutions managed by the federal Ministry of Education (MEC) – were organized by the mid-twentieth century (Neves, 2017). Their emphasis on free enrollment, democratic governance, and academic freedom were influenced by earlier reforms in the region, including the 1918 Córdoba University Reform in Argentina (Theiler, 2005; Bernasconi, 2007; Azevedo et al, 2018; Braggio, 2018; Abba & Streck, 2021).

Public university students have been on the front lines of mobilization efforts against authoritarianism and defense of democratic institutions at critical junctures. The day after the military dictatorship’s (1964-1985) successful coup, soldiers razed the National Student Union (UNE) headquarters as university students mobilized against the regime, with thousands being detained and tortured (Filho, 1998; Snider, 2016; Napolitano, 2018). Pavlic (2017) found that between 2000 and 2012, Brazil had the highest frequency of student protests in Latin America. In 2013, university students organized national protests against Brazil’s growing socioeconomic inequities, calling for increased spending on social programs (Miller, 2017). More recently, students mobilized protests in response to authoritarian rhetoric and unprecedented cuts to public education throughout the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022).

Enrollment at universities continues to rise across many countries and regime contexts (Rumbley et al, 2022). This is true in Brazil, as well: from 2011-2021, the number of undergraduate students grew from 6.7 to 8.9 million (INEP, 2022). Concurrently, a period of democratic backsliding has led to growing interdisciplinary interest into the types of institutions that support and sustain democracy, including HEIs (Daniels 2021). Education has long been associated with theories about the development of youth political behavior – specifically in democratic contexts. Undoubtedly, schools – including universities – play a role in shaping future citizens and political actors (Lipset, 1960; Youniss et al, 2002; McFarland et al, 2006; Altbach, 2007; Galambos & Martinez, 2007; Pancer et al, 2007; Guzmán-Valenzuela, 2016; Kristinsson, 2023). Recent studies demonstrate the efficacy of university students’ political participation and transformative potential, including examples from Chile (Bellei et al, 2014), Canada (Bégin-Caouette & Jones, 2014), Hong Kong (Chan, 2016), and South Africa (Cini, 2019).

The type of higher education institution one attends may dramatically affect students’ political knowledge, understandings, skills, and capacity. The higher education sector in Brazil, as is the case throughout the Latin American region, has undergone dramatic changes since 2000 with the near-exponential growth of private for-profit universities. By 2020, approximately 87% of Brazilian HEIs were private, enrolling 75% of the nation’s higher education students – over 40% of which are enrolled at for-profit institutions (Barbosa et al, 2023). Public universities – regarded as Brazil’s most prestigious hubs of research – are consistently criticized for their bureaucratic and financial inefficiency (Fonesca, 2018). For-profit institutions are viewed as profit-centered, corporate “diploma factories” lacking in both academic rigor and return on investment for the mainly low-income students enrolled at such institutions (Pascuci & Fishlow, 2023).

Given growing global evidence that HEIs serve as important centers for the development of political knowledge, understanding, and skills, an important yet unanswered question is whether different types of HEIs fulfill this role. Brazil serves as an ideal context in which to explore this question given the clear boundaries between its public, private non-profit, and for-profit sectors.

As universities in Brazil are, to some extent, all mission driven institutions (Souza et al, 2013), this paper uses content analysis to compare and analyze the mission statements of a random sample of public, private non-profit, and private for-profit universities located in the state of Minas Gerais – an important center for the nation’s higher education sector which institutions in other regions seek to emulate. Mission statements are useful in that they illuminate the core dimensions, goals, and purposes of a HEI, or its “reason for being” (OFOPA, 2018; Breznik, 2019; Adebanke Olusola et al, 2022), though other scholars have found that missions can be vague or unmoored from institutional realities (Ellis & Miller, 2014; Cortés et al, 2022). Nevertheless, a university’s mission statement must, in some sense, be related to what unfolds on its campus. Using categorical tools developed by Kuenssberg (2011) and Manning (2021) to examine the mission statements of HEIs, this paper will use qualitative word processing software to examine the extent to which mission statements of different types of universities mention their contribution to developing democratically engaged students and political actors, including keywords such as “democracy,” “social justice,” and “society.” Additional content analysis will be performed on those missions that reference such keywords to compare similarities and differences according to institutional type and location. Similar studies have been undertaken to examine other themes within Brazilian HEI missions, including internationalization (Guimarães et al, 2020), institutional sustainability (Deus et al, 2016), and institutional isomorphism (Janissek et al, 2013).

Author

• Anthony Lewis Wagner, New York University