Flexibilização da oferta do ensino superior: a mobilidade espacial de estudantes e as conexões geográficas em Minas Gerais

Abstract

The Brazilian Government promoted a series of institutional reformations with the objective of integrating the country to the precepts of restructured production and globalized economy. In this context, the Law of Guidelines and Bases of the National Education (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional – LDB) was also remodelled in 1996, with greater loosening of the offer of places in higher education. In the following decades other changes took place: restructuring and augmenting the funds to support students, creating a funding system for students in private institutions, and increasing the numbers of Federal universities and institutes. These policies, which is called in this thesis the “loosening of the offer of places in higher education”, favoured an expressive growth of the enrolment in institutions of higher education throughout the country, and particularly in the state of Minas Gerais. The hypothesis used to guide this research is that the changes in both the parameters and the policies promoted a reorganization of the spatial distribution of the offer, and had a reflection in the pendular and intercity migratory fluxes, which, on their turn, induced nexuses and differentiation in the urban network in Minas Gerais. Thus, from the new regional configurations the geographical connections between the capital, the regional centres, and their areas of influence were intensified, inducing alterations that can be evaluated through the evaluation of the spatial mobility of the population. In this sense, the geographical connections among Belo Horizonte and the regional centres in the countryside of Minas Gerais were examined. These connections resulted from the above-mentioned process of loosening the offer for places in higher education. The methodological processes adopted in this thesis analyse the increase in the numbers of courses offered and enrolment, and a group of indicators that were used to both identify the regional centres and to evaluate the geographical connections based in the spatial mobility of the population. The results indicate the regional redistribution of the enrolment but maintain the proportionality of the enrolled between the cities of the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte (RMBH) and of the state’s countryside. The population fluxes to Belo Horizonte and twenty-eight other regional centres in the countryside of Minas Gerais were inspected. They conveyed the identification of the growth in the mobility of the students in higher education among the regions of the state. In addition to that, it verified the diverse patterns of polarization exerted by the capital and the other major cities in such migration, what revealed the varied impacts in the growth and expansion process of the higher education. These findings also contributed to add an empirical dimension to the theoretical possibilities raised during the writing of this thesis on alternative interpretations, through both the concepts of geographical connections and of urban network.