The Access to the Brazilian Public Higher Education: Analysis about the Profile of the Entering Students in Courses of Prestige of Federal University of Rio De Janeiro

For a long time, Brazilian higher education was addressed to a small portion of the more socioeconomically favored population. In the last decades, this level of education has undergone transformations that involve the implementation of policies that aim to expand and democratize access. However, it is possible to perceive that the expansion of higher education and the arrival of a more heterogeneous public, especially in public universities, have been happening more broadly in courses of less social prestige, potentializing an uneven distribution between courses. In this way, it is necessary to analyze the profile of those who enter high social prestige courses and in what dimensions have the initiatives created by the federal government to democratize access to Brazilian public higher education have contributed to diversify the profile of students in these courses. Therefore, the purpose of this text is to discuss the extent to which access policies such as affirmative action and the Brazilian National Examination of the High School / Brazilian Unified Selection System (ENEM/SISU) have collaborated so that students with a more diversified profile enter courses of high social prestige - Medicine, Law and Engineering - of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Thus, supported by theoretical conceptions produced in the perspective of the Sociology of Education, we will develop a quantitative analysis, using descriptive statistics. We will use the microdata of the socioeconomic questionnaire, applied by UFRJ in the pre-enrollment of the selected students in the years 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 of mentioned courses. The variables selected for this research are: family income, student origin, mother's schooling, entrance modality and color/race.