A relação entre as mudanças na estrutura etária e a expansão do ensino superior brasileiro nas últimas décadas

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to analyze the relationship between the changes in the Brazilian age structure and the expansion of access to higher education in the last decades. This relation is built on how the shifts of the dependency ratio affect the probability of attending or have attended an undergraduate course in the traditional age group of 18 to 24 years whom usually attend higher education. Since Brazil is still living the demographic bonus or dividend, which could contribute in more effective investments in human capital, the intention here is to find out if any advantage was taken from this period regarding higher education. Moreover, we search for factors that play a role in helping or obstructing this possible effect. For this purpose we used the Brazilian Census of 1991, 2000 and 2010 provided by IBGE and data from the Higher Education Census from the same years provided by INEP. The data was used to formulate a hierarchical model that was used to estimate the probability of attending an undergraduate course. Analyses show that there was no gain from the demographic dividend between the years of 1991 to 2010 even though there was an increase in enrollment at that period. After the results showed that the effect of the demographic pressure over the probability of attending or having attended an undergraduate course was not the expected in any of the years, we concluded that there was no advantage taken from this period. On one hand, the macro factors that interfered in order to obstruct this advantage were the restrictions on the supply of this level of education and problems concerning education continuity like the proportion of older people still in undergraduate courses and the delay in educating people from 18 to 24 years of age. On the other hand, the micro factors concern control variables at the individual level that show results similar to those found in other papers. The access to higher education is limited for individuals with an adverse background especially regarding economic capital, cultural capital and also concerning race. Furthermore, women have an advantage over men in attending undergraduate courses.