Para além do diploma fraco: análise da contribuição para a justiça social pela educação superior privada

Abstract

The field of higher education and educational policies is permeated by discussions between public and private, access and financing policies and state regulation. For the most part, it’s notorious the defense of the public in detriment of the private among researchers, with the private system described in texts as an education network that offers courses of inferior quality and limited training, makes teaching work precarious, stifles curricula and is incapable of inserting the graduate in good positions in the labor market. This context instigated and shaped the hypothesis of the thesis: whether a HEI, even a private one, can be fair; whether this Weak Diploma, which supposedly does not make a difference in the lives of graduating students, can contribute to social justice. In face of higher education as a commodity and its consequent pressure for profit, that the understanding that the quality of the graduate's training path is essential for a critical awareness, worldview and professional qualification and that the regulation of the State induces this quality, can private higher education institutions be fair? Thus, the thesis analyzes the contribution of higher education institutions to social justice by the private system based on the proposition of a heuristic model of a Fair HEI. The methodological path of the work was designed based on three theoretical contributions: Higher Education, Regulation and Social Justice, from which the concepts for the notion of a fair school were built based on the studies of François Dubet, John Rawls and Nancy Fraser, and on the role of regulation of higher education analyzed by the slow of Historical Neo-institutionalism (NIH) and Policy Instruments. At first, four categories that supported the content analysis were designed through indicators that led to the analysis of resultant data from studies in two private institutions located in the peripheral regions of two capitals of the country between April 2020 and October of 2021. In these HEIs, the institutional documents PDI and PPC were analyzed and semi-structured interviews were carried out with the managers and a questionnaire was applied to the graduating students. From the analysis of the Sinaes Law and its instruments, it’s possible to infer that this system was designed based on the integral training of the student and contemplated in its ten evaluative dimensions. However, in practice, the policy text has results and effects that can create different consequences from those planned, when they materialize in society. As a result, Sinaes is permeated by criticism, given its emphasis on Enade and on its production of indicators that rank institutions but fail to express what actually occurs in the context of the HEI and in the training of students. The full reading of the documents made Sinaes’ mirroring clear and its orientation towards the construction of policies and proposals aligned with social justice. Managers endorse the transforming role of higher education in the lives of students, but they do not have full ownership of institutional documents. Some gaps were observed between the documents of HEI B and their appropriation by managers, with lower Preliminary Course Concept (CPC), but they did not bring objective consequences in the students' perception. Graduates with similar socioeconomic profiles from the two HEIs confirm the importance of positive discrimination and they perceive that the full training offered by the HEIs are very close to the fair HEI of the students of HEI A, which has the highest score in the CPC.