Public or Private? Daytime or Nocturnal? Which Field of Study? How Did Blacks and First Generation Students Accessed Higher Education in Brazil between 2000 and 2010.

Between 2002 and 2014 the Brazilian higher education system had a growth of 80% in its conclusion rates. The system grew from 466,200 to 837,000 students. During the period, several public policies were implemented to foster access in HE, both in the public and private sector. The purpose of these policies was to make the system more permeable for blacks and students of low socioeconomic status. The scope and speed of these changes makes Brazil an ideal case to evaluate how race and socioeconomic status shape the access of historically excluded groups in access to the higher education system in the country. Our aim in this paper is not only to investigate if access was broaden, but also where it occurred, mainly through the incorporation of field of study and two other crucial dimensions that structure the horizontal inequality in the Brazilian higher education system: sector (public or private) and shift (day or night). Through a conditional logit modeling strategy, we incorporate these institutional characteristics to understand how ascriptive characteristics (SES and race) operate differently to allocate students in the previously mentioned dimensions at two points in time. We use six databases constructed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education that are representative of students who finished higher education in 2006-2009 and 2014-2016, pre and post expansion contexts. Our empirical strategy will allow us to understand the heterogeneity of racial and socioeconomic effects across time taking the institutional characteristics of the Brazilian higher education system into account. In dialogue with the international literature, we can evaluate if Brazil is a case that fits the pattern of effectively maintained inequality or if redistributive initiatives such as the policies mentioned above operate in order to change the direction of inequality of opportunities in the country.