Inequality of opportunity in access to higher education in Brazil: A comparison between 2003 and 2013

Resumen

In spite of overall improvements in basic and high school education levels in the last decades, and of an increase in the supply of higher education, only 12% of Brazilian youths in the expected age are attending higher education in Brazil, against 21%in Argentina, 65%in the USA and 70% in Sweden. In this study, based on the most recent Pnad data (2013) and on data from ten years earlier (2003, just before the implementation of affirmative action policies), we obtained profiles of vulnerable and nonvulnerable groups in terms of access to higher education in Brazil. Then through the index of human opportunities (Barros et al. 2009), and making use of binary dependent variable regressions, we were able to measure inequality of opportunity in terms of access to higher education for both years. Results indicate that a reallocation of opportunities from nonvulnerable to vulnerable groups has taken place, and that access to higher education has also risen slightly in the course of one decade. However, the index of human opportunity as applied to higher education in Brazil (HOI = 0.281 in 2013) is very far from the ideal situation (HOI=1), which occurs when access is universal and there is no inequality of opportunity in the access. Finally, we have applied a Shapley decomposition to the calculated indices, and the main results are the substantial contribution of household-head’s education level and the household’s income to inequality of opportunity, and also a moderate impact of race.