A quick overview on the higher education in Brazil
Picture of Federal University of Paraná.
In this post, I will talk about the higher education (university) in Brazil and show some statistics.
There are private and public universities in Brazil. The level is higher in public universities than in private universities. In public universities, all courses, Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorates are completely free. In the private ones, one must pay tuition fees and almost no research is carried out (which implies no Master or Doctorate courses), with few exceptions like the Pontifical Catholic Universities (PUC). You can find here an incomplete list of public universities in Brazil.
In the public sector, there are state universities and federal universities. In the federal sphere, there are 55 universities which currently offer 227.668 vacancies for students at the Bachelor level. Furthermore, these federal universities offer more than 1.400 post-graduation courses, from which more than half are at the Doctorate level. These post-graduation courses are currently followed by about 70.000 students (most of them are supported by scholarships from the government).
As public universities are free and offer high quality courses, there is intense competition to get in in the universities during a type of concourse or examination called “vestibular“. The “vestibular” is a big event for a student’s life in Brazil, where stress and anxiety are normally present.
A Bachelor in Brazil, which can take from 4 to 6 years, is comparable to the American Bachelor and to a European Masters (see the Section “Degree equivalence with other countries“).
The most prominent universities are the University of São Paulo (USP) and Unicamp, which are usually listed on world university rankings.
Links:
- Universities and higher education in Brazil (with photo gallery from some institutions)
- Ranking of universities in Brazil
- List of universities in Brazil, divided by States
- Statistics about federal Brazilian universities (in Portuguese)
