Expansão e interiorização do ensino superior brasileiro: desigualdades e transformações regionais

Abstract

Higher education in Brazil has historically been concentrated in large urban centers, which has contributed to maintaining regional inequalities and limiting access for a significant portion of the population. In recent decades, public policies have been implemented to expand and internalize higher education, with the aim of decentralizing provision and increasing the presence of institutions in the interior municipalities. However, it is still uncertain whether this expansion has been able to change the educational and regional structure of the country or whether it has ended up reinforcing pre-existing patterns of spatial concentration. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to analyze the impact of the expansion of Brazilian higher education by investigating whether the creation of new universities and campuses has altered the territorial distribution of enrollments and the regional centrality of municipalities, as well as assessing its effects on the spatial organization of educational provision. To this end, the research employs various methodological approaches, including descriptive analysis, spatiotemporal clustering, indicator construction, and spatial econometric modeling, which allow for a comprehensive assessment of the changes associated with the internalization of higher education. The results show that although the expansion policy has significantly increased the number of enrollments and diversified the presence of institutions on the national territory, their distribution has remained uneven. Some regions have concentrated on most of the new places and courses, while others have maintained low educational attractiveness, showing that the expansion of supply has not been sufficient to rebalance the regional structure of higher education. Moreover, the analysis of regional educational centrality shows that the impact of the creation of new universities has been heterogeneous across municipalities. While some have consolidated themselves as university hubs and strengthened their economic and social dynamics, others have not shown significant changes, suggesting that the effect of expansion is conditioned by structural factors such as local infrastructure, the labor market, and regional interaction networks. In some cases, the presence of new institutions promoted the diversification of the local economy, while in others the impact was limited, with no significant change in the urban hierarchy. Given this scenario, the thesis contributes to the understanding of the territorial reorganization of higher education by empirically evaluating its effects on the spatial distribution of institutions and their role in regional dynamics. The results indicate that the internalization of higher education, although a step forward, requires complementary policies to ensure a better link between educational supply and local demand, increasing the effectiveness of higher education as an instrument of regional development. The conclusion is that although university expansion has improved access to education, its effects on reducing regional inequalities are still limited and require more integrated strategies capable of aligning educational policies with the economic and social needs of the territories.