Carvalho, Marília Pinto de2024-04-232024-04-232021-11-25https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14135/1020The last three decades have witnessed an unprecedented increase in enrolments in higher education in Brazil which, alongside inclusive policies both in public and private education sectors, have resulted in an ever-expanding offer of places, and in a student profile increasingly diversified. However, under the aegis of democratization of education opportunities, the country has produced a generation of youngsters that have met with a more competitive higher education system, in which mechanisms of production and reproduction of social inequalities still endure. The system has never had so many students in it and, paradoxically, there have never been so many youngsters left out of it. This study aims at investigating the transformations in access to higher education in Brazil between the years 1991 and 2020. To such end, the research made use of mixed methodologies, and it was organized into three levels of analysis: macro-, meso-, and micro-sociological. At the macro-sociological level, I analyze educational data from the whole period to characterize the wider transformations in access, offer, and demand for higher education in Brazil. I conclude that there are five trends – the democratization of access, the establishment of affirmative actions, public-private imbalance, expansion of distance education, and horizontal stratification – and that the expansion process, despite having benefited at first the more privileged social layers, has more recently promoted the entry of less privileged students, with consequences to opportunity and access inequalities. The meso-sociological level develops an overview of the situation of students finishing secondary education between 2012 and 2017, based on the crossing of educational data, and affords a discussion of the effects of social origin and academic performance on the transition from secondary to higher education, apart from an investigation of to whom and under which circumstances performance functions as a harbinger of access. I conclude that youngsters from privileged backgrounds benefit from access strategies that place less emphasis on higher grades, which are adopted by private institutions in a phenomenon known in the literature as compensatory advantages; on the other hand, for underprivileged students, the only form of entry is through higher grades in the admission process. Therefore, the bonus for better performance is higher for underprivileged students, but also is the cost of not achieving it. Lastly, at the micro-sociological level, a fieldwork was conducted in Brasília, Federal District, with the use of questionnaires distributed at community preparatory courses with the intent of selecting twenty students for semistructured interviews. The narratives of these youngsters allow us to describe their experience of a reality shock after finishing secondary education, as a result of a mismatch between the craft of a secondary school student and what I characterize as the craft of a preparatory course student. Based on this friction between logics of action, I conclude that the youngsters are exposed to two different perspectives: meritocracy and pragmatism. Finally, the discussion helps to clarify how the process of expansion of higher education brought about a change in the way in which the right to education has been understood.Documento textualporAcesso abertoEducação InclusivaAcesso à Educação SuperiorExpansão do Ensino SuperiorTese120920