Neoliberalismo e bem-estar social na educação superior: relação com a distribuição de renda no Chile no regime militar (1981-1988) e no Brasil no regime democrático (2000-2020)

Abstract

Neoliberal influence in Latin America began with its greatest exponent in Chile during Pinochet's military regime. The process of transformation of the country by neoliberalism reached its peak in the 1980, when its results affected the role of higher education and the profile of student access. Pinochet's military regime ended with the defeat of the military in the 1988 Plebiscite, however, the constitution drafted in 1980 and the neoliberal system implemented by the Chicago Boys persisted even in a democratic regime, with the main effect on higher education being the maintenance of fees and tuition charges at public universities until 2018, 30 years after the end of the regime. A year later, in 2019, constitutional amendment bill 206/2019 was drafted in Brazil, which sought to charge tuition fees at public universities. This thesis is part of the investigation of the contexts of these opposing political movements, in which in Chile higher education is once again free, while in Brazil the aim is to end free education, even if only partially, in public universities. The right to free public universities is fundamental both to guarantee equality in access to and permanence in higher education and also to the formation of quality human capital in education, because if its formation is unequal, the tendency is to contribute to the maintenance or increase of inequalities in income distribution. In other words, an economic policy, in this case a neoliberal one, can have unequal effects on higher education, which in turn can result in economic effects through the way in which human capital is formed, which can be inequalities in income distribution. Thus, this thesis has the general objective of: Comparing higher education policies in Chile (1981-1988) and Brazil (2000-2020), identifying the neoliberal and social welfare characteristics in their models, as well as the relationships they present with social, economic and educational inequalities. To this end, bibliographic and documentary research was conducted, using discourse analysis and statistical data on higher education, human capital formation, and income distribution. The results revealed that in Pinochet's Chile, access to higher education was unequal, exclusionary, and meritocratic, as a consequence of the neoliberal policies implemented by the Chicago Boys, which tended toward unequal human capital formation. During the same period, the Gini coefficient tended to increase. In Brazil, there is a conflict between two parallel higher education projects: one that was more prominent during the Lula and Dilma governments, based on democratizing access to higher education and its potential to reduce inequalities in income distribution, and a second that was present throughout the 20 years analyzed, which sought to transform higher education through neoliberal logic and tended to contribute to increasing inequalities in access to and retention in higher education, in human capital formation, and in income distribution.