Social Origins and the Access to Public Higher Education in Brazil

According to the well know MMI hypothesis (Raftery and Hout, 1993; Shavit and Blossfeld, 1993), the class inequality on the distribution of educational opportunities tend to decline only when attendance rates reaches saturation at given educational levels for the upper classes. Lucas (2001) challenged this view introducing the EMI theory which proposes that, even when saturation is achieved for a given educational level, inequalities tend to persist in a qualitative sense, with kids from privileged socio-economic background having more chances of going to the better schools or universities. This means that IEO had to be analyzed not only in reference to attendance to a certain educational level, but also in reference to which segment (or track) in the educational system the individual accesses.     

This proposal aims at analyzing the association between social origins and educational destinations through the selection process of a prestige public higher education institution in Brazil. Drawing on the notion of tracking, we want to evaluate (a) given the high competitiveness of the selection process, how is the association between social origins and chances of obtaining a place at this elite institution; and (b) if this association varies depending on which undergraduate course option the student applied for. Research has already shown how students from private schools have more chances of progression in all educational levels (Ribeiro, 2011; Montalvão, 2011) in the country, but the IEO between different tracks in public higher educational institutions in Brazil has never been analyzed before. Also this proposal relies on the use of data collected in the moment that the application is made, and it contains information on the entire universe of candidates on the selection process of this specific institution, which is another contribution to the empirical literature on the theme in Brazil, based mainly on cross-sectional household surveys.