Quota system and the new protagonists in a contemporary public higher education in Brazil

Higher Education in Brazil has been going through many changes for the last two decades due to the market demands and its cultural and social selective nature opposing effective democratization. Institutional diversification expresses its discriminatory organizational forms, which hierarchy and classification are derived. The dissimulating nature of social inequality and school trajectory are disguised by the argument of the myth of talent and individual struggle. Emerged from social movements, specially those focused on human rights, affirmative actions arose from the disruption against old compensatory polices .The result is a number of projects for public school and higher education. The Quota Policy in higher education is considered a collective strategy for democratization to access and qualitative permanence, reserving places for social groups historically excluded, such as non-white or afro-descendents, public school students, indigenous and handicapped. Politically and educationally, affirmative polices are defined and signified as a commitment and a possible policy for historical reparation of increasing school inequalities mediated by cultural and social inequalities. This program is not mandatory and the institutions determine the number of places to be offered to specific groups. This work proposes to discuss how these groups are distributed in the quota system by higher education institutions and how this policy moves towards democratization of access of these groups. This study is part of an ongoing research in the line of Education, Society and Culture in a doctorate program. A research about  the strategies of democratization in higher education by documental analysis of the National Education Plans of 2011-2010 and 2010-2020 (which is currently being discussed in the National Congress), as well as the quota distribution map, which reveals the relevance of the protagonists by its nomination and  reservation indexes of places, was carried out for this study.