Can undergraduate courses offset the lack of student´s background and cultural capital?

Abstract

In recent times, due to the massification of the systems and the expansion of the access of students from disadvantaged family, socioeconomic and cultural contexts, the improvement of quality and equity has become an important challenge for higher education policies. Especially in developing countries, with a late process to universalize basic schooling and great social inequality, cultural capital and background can undermine the learning and development of these young people at college level. In this context, Brazil created one of the largest databases in the world containing relevant socioeconomic information about students and their performance in large-scale exams. Thus, in order to evaluate the possibilities of increasing equity in higher education and having the international literature on school effectiveness as our theoretical framework, we performed the crosschecking of empirical data between students’ performances and perceptions on quality attributes of undergraduate courses. Our findings in the Enade´s Specific Evaluation Component, in a sample of Business and Law courses predominantly attended by students from lower classes, allow us to argue in favor of the possibility of undergraduate courses to counterbalance, to some extent, discrepancies in cultural capital and background of these undergraduates.