Políticas públicas de acesso ao ensino superior: o caso do PROBEM em Campina Grande-PB.

Abstract

Brazil has the striking feature of inequality in the areas of income, access to education and public services, in contrast to the strong valuation, mandatory and distributive burden, with regard to the enjoyment and provision of social rights that result from the Federal Constitution. Considered education as an essential factor for the reduction of inequalities, the access to higher education strata, historically linked to elites, was impacted by centralized public policies by the federal government at the beginning of the XXI century, which implemented an increase in the number of public institutions and, consequently, the quantity of vacancies, assuming a democratizing bias; although there is still a predominance in the number of enrollments in the private sphere. Despite the little attention given to social policies implemented at the subnational level, the present study aims to analyse the public policy entitled Municipal Education Scholarship Program (MESP)1, developed in the city of Campina Grande/Paraiba, based on the perceptions measured by its recipients (students from public schools in this town) and executors (representatives of private institutions adhering to the program). The research, under the qualitative and descriptive modality, dealing with a case study, operationalized through content analysis of public documents, in interview with the program implementers, through semi-structured forms, and questionnaires of multiple choice statements that were submitted to the beneficiaries, via e-mail and instant messaging application, whose data come from the Municipal Finance Secretariat. The work is divided into six parts: a) the methodological path is presented to the interlocutor, followed by the theoretical foundation pertinent to the field of policies and analysis of public policies in the first two parts; b) the expansion policies of Brazilian higher education are contextualized in the third part; c) the federal policies to encourage access to higher education verified in the last 20 years are outlined, covering initiatives relevant to the public and private sectors in the fourth stage; d)MESP is outlined by describing the institutional arrangement, subsequently comprising the views of the program's executors and recipients in the fifth stage; and e) the compilation of the data obtained from the research is verified, launching, at the end of the present study, the analysis of the policy through the final considerations are presented in the sixth and final section. The research data describe that, with an innovative character in the scope of federalism, the MESP, between the years 2015 and 2018, had already contemplated 777 (seven hundred and seventy-seven) students from the Public Education System, which showed wide acceptance, in the order 87.95%. In addition, this municipal education grant program had a tax impact of 6.46% and 2.55% of the total TSAK2 collected, on average, per month, in 2018 (BRL 49,795,087.03). Regarding the institutions analysed, there was a low institutionalization of the policy, substantiated by the lack of availability of data on the number of scholarships granted in official ME3 statistics, as well as a forecast of tax waiver in the annual municipal budget law, which is why an increase in accountability is suggested to legitimize the redistributive character and replication by other federative units of lesser degree.