Introduction
…they never wavered in their insistence that while markets made great servants, they also made terrible masters.
Income inequality in access to tertiary education in Brazil is at its lowest levels ever recorded. Over the past three decades, income inequality in accessing tertiary education — as measured in Figure 1 — declined sharply. The system that produced this result is not an obvious candidate for a more egalitarian distribution of access. In most of the system, admission requires neither academic performance nor competitive examination — but the ability to pay tuition. In the early 1990s, Brazil’s tertiary system was one of the proportionally smallest in Latin America, restricted even by regional standards. As it expanded — growing from 1.6 million to over 10 million enrolled students between 1994 and 2024 — the private sector grew enormously and consolidated, giving rise to some of the largest for-profit tertiary education companies in the world, a process widely described, including in the academic literature, as a state-sponsored privatization and financialization of higher education. Figure 2 traces what that expansion was made of: enrolment multiplied roughly sevenfold after 1980, and by 2024 four students in five were in private institutions, three in five in legally for-profit ones, and half were enrolled at a distance. Yet Brazil, once a prominent laggard in educational attainment, became a reference case for affirmative action programs and means-tested subsidies that helped to alter the income composition of who enters tertiary education at participating institutions. Percapta income grew in real terms continuosly from 2003 to 2014 before stagnating or even declinig. Under different political conditions, and with a mostly private educational system, this trajectory could easily have been deeply regressive: more places sold at market prices to those who could already pay, while the poor remained outside. How can this reduction in inequality be explained, and how were the institutions that produced it constructed? These two interconnected research questions — what drove the change in access inequality, and how the institutions that reduced it were politically constructed — guide this dissertation.
Expansion is a frequent answer: with more places available, more students enter, and eventually the odds of entry for the poor become less unequal. The two major theoretical accounts of how educational inequality changes in contexts of enrollment expansion rest on different mechanisms. The social stratification literature in sociology posits that enrollment growth leads to equalization only under specific conditions: either the saturation of upper-class demand (Raftery & Hout, 1993; Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993) or reduced competition for available slots (Alon, 2009; Jackson, 2021). The comparative political economy of education literature frames the same expansion through a political channel: the gross enrollment rate and the policy conditions under which access is de-commodified serve as the primary cleavage between left- and right-leaning parties (Ansell, 2010). The Brazilian trajectory, however, challenges simplist understandings of those mechaniss. Expansion was not redistributive when this cycle began: inequality did not fall during the enrollment boom of the 1990s, nor did it decline consistently thereafter. The saturation logic does not apply, as no social group was close to saturation at the onset of equalization. The competition logic is also a weak candidate: a substantial share of public-sector places is now reserved through quotas, and the private sector is largely non-selective. Nor was expansion a partisan cleavage: every government of the past thirty years, from 1995 onwards, regardless of partisan orientation, pursued expansionist policies. The private sector grew continuously across all administrations; what varied was not whether it expanded, but whether access was de-commodified through targeted subsidies and affirmative action — and whether the real incomes of poor households were rising.
The literature’s closest approach to this answer came from within stratification research itself: in the most important challenge to the persistent-inequality consensus, Breen et al. (2009) showed that class inequalities in educational attainment declined across cohorts born through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century in eight European countries. The explanation they propose for the inequality decrese are the decline of direct costs of schooling as fees were abolished and government expanded school supply, real family incomes grew beyond what basic needs required, the pressure on working-class children to start earning early receded, and welfare states narrowed class differences in the capacity to bear educational costs — most clearly where income equalization was stronger, as in Sweden.
Our answer to that first question shifts the focus from enrollment volume to the structure of the income barrier that gates access to tertiary education. We argue that access inequality is governed by a cost-benefit calculus anchored in household income constraints, educational costs, and returns, following the cost-benefit logic that underpins Raftery & Hout (1993)’s model, further developed by Breen & Goldthorpe (1997). Under this framework, access inequality fell through two main channels, underpinned by a necessary pre-condition. The first is the affordability channel, driven by rising real incomes relative to tuition prices, which reduced the relative cost of continued study for poorer households — formalizing as an explicit mechanism what Breen et al. (2009) had registered as background. The second is the de-commodification channel, that work though subsidies (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Garritzmann, 2016), which deployed targeted subsidies and affirmative action — ProUni scholarships, FIES subsidized loans, racial and socioeconomic quotas, and REUNI’s expansion of federal universities into underserved areas and more inclusive course profiles — to reduce the income-dependence of access and include targeted groups. Both channels were enabled by a necessary but insufficient pre-condition: the prior expansion of free public secondary education, which made a mass cohort of low-income graduates eligible to attempt entry — an expansion itself rooted in the 1988 Constitution, which, at redemocratization, made secondary education a free and mandatory stage of Brazilian schooling.
Both channels are regulated by political disputes and the explanation cannot be synthesized as a only a partisan cleavage. Contrary to partisan-theory expectations, the de-commodification instruments were not a simple product of partisan preferences: the actors who shaped their design and distributive targeting most decisively include non-partisan ones — social movements that pushed redistribution further than any governing coalition would have proposed on its own; the for-profit sector that lobbied to dilute targeting and convert credit into demand subsidies; and the fiscal and institutional constraints that made private provision structurally indispensable. Nor was the affordability channel a market outcome: real-income growth at the bottom resulted from deliberate welfare-state policies — minimum-wage valorization, income transfers, pension indexation (Arretche, 2018; Kerstenetzky, 2019). The answer to the first question thus opens the second: once the fall in inequality is traced to politically variable parameters — incomes, prices, subsidies — the question of who varied them, in what design, and against what resistance can no longer be treated as background. How the income barrier was politically shaped across both channels — through which actors, coalitions, and constraints the terms of access were changed over three decades — forms the core of the second research question this dissertation addresses.
The dissertation addresses its two research questions through two complementary empirical strategies that share a common mode of inference — inference to the best explanation (IBE). Part II develops a descriptive analysis of the trajectory of access inequality using harmonized household survey data from the PNAD and PNADC covering 1992 to 2025. It adjudicates among three rival explanations of the trajectory — saturation, competition, and what we are calling the income-barrier framework — through their discriminating observable implications, using causal estimates of specific policy instruments from the quasi-experimental economics of education literature as evidentiary inputs. Part III implements the abductive standard formally, employing IBE process tracing (Fairfield & Charman, 2022) to evaluate three pairs of competing hypotheses about the political origins of reform. Its evidence base combines legislative records and official Ministry of Education documents with a systematically collected corpus of Folha de São Paulo press coverage from 1994 to 2024, assembled through a custom scraper and coded for actor positions, coalition dynamics, and policy framing across the full period.
Derived from the harmonized household survey series, the trajectory visible in Figure 1 provides the primary descriptive evidence for this argument, unfolding in four distinct phases. The plateau at high levels during the 1990s and early 2000s shows that vigorous enrollment expansion in that period did not come with a reduction in inequality in the composition of who accessed tertiary education. The sharp decline in access inequality between 2005 and 2015 represents the period in which the barrier fell rapidly: real household incomes at the bottom rose, tuition prices fell relative to them, the cohorts of poor secondary graduates grew ever more eligible, and the public policies that decreased income dependence in access to tertiary education were introduced and scaled. These instruments altered who could benefit from expansion, rather than merely how many slots were available — a supply that, absent targeted instruments, flows either to those who can pay for private places or to those whose families managed to sustain the educational investment that competitive public admission requires. The stagnation between 2015 and 2021 is equally telling: enrollment continued to grow through distance education while key de-commodifying instruments were restructured or eroded and real income growth stalled. Finally, the resumption of decline after 2021 illustrates the reopening of the affordability channel, as minimum-wage growth met a supply side cheapened by distance learning.
Three findings emerge from the analysis, each a better explanation than the current literature proposes. First, the partisan cleavage that matters runs along de-commodification rather than expansion. Contrary to trilemma theories predicting right-wing resistance to expansion, right-leaning governments in Brazil favored enrollment growth but restricted public spending, prioritizing fiscally cheap expansion by enabling private-sector growth through regulatory change while reducing costs to the government. PT governments (2003–2016) distinguished themselves not by expanding enrollment more — as all administrations expanded — but by reducing the income-dependence of access through ProUni (2005), REUNI (2007), FIES (scaled 2010–2014), and affirmative action in free public universities alongside broader income-redistribution policies that, in a period of economic growth, led to an increase in poor households’ income and a decline in inequality (Arretche, 2018; Souza & Hecksher, 2026). That explanation is consistent, as far as the evidence we collected shows, with all periods of decline and stagnation in inequality. Second, non-partisan actors were causally decisive in opposing directions. Social movements drove the construction of the quota system over more than a decade of mobilization largely outside party channels, producing a legislative outcome whose scope and durability exceeded what any governing coalition could have achieved by itself — the work of a distinct, broader coalition, and a form of what Holland & Schneider (2017) call “hard redistribution” that created identifiable losers and required sustained pressure against resistance within the governing coalition itself. Third, private-sector dominance across all administrations is better explained by fiscal path dependence than by ideological preference. The institutional inheritance of the 1968 military-era reform, combined with binding fiscal constraints on public expansion, made the private sector structurally indispensable for any government seeking rapid enrollment growth — regardless of its declared programmatic preferences.
Building on extensive empirical research on changes in inequality in the Brazilian case (Arretche, 2019; Arretche et al., 2019), the dissertation speaks to different bodies of scholarship that have developed largely in parallel, with limited direct engagement across their shared object of study: the social stratification literature and the comparative political economy of education. Its central contribution is that the decisive distributive axis for explaining changes in access inequality is the reduction of the income barrier — a concept that encompasses both de-commodifying educational instruments and redistributive policies that raise poor households’ real incomes. The affordability channel is not a market background condition but a political product, shaped by minimum-wage policy, income transfers, and pension indexation — mechanisms whose role in reducing class inequality Breen et al. (2009) proposed as a possible explanation yet treated as background conditions of post-war economic development, precisely because that framework lacked the political variables needed to explain their production. The parts of the dissertation develop this claim as follows.
Part I reconstructs how different intellectual traditions offer theories and analytical frameworks with important implications explaining how inequality of access to tertiary education works, yet they have largely developed with scarce engagement with one another. We trace the developments of two of these fields—social stratification and comparative political economy—arguing that a joint reading yields key analytical advantages with direct consequences for new empirical research. While the social stratification literature extensively described educational inequality across many countries from the twentieth century onwards, causal theories capable of explaining their findings once expectations of persistent inequality were proven false remained underdevelopep. This field was initially marked by historicist theories, succeeded by a consensus around the thesis that educational inequality remained invariant over most of the twentieth century. Over the last two decades, this consensus has eroded; yet part of the new research in the field remains reticent to advance and test new explanations even after the causal assumptions underlying earlier theories eroded (Jackson, 2021), while other scholars continue to reiterate the persistence thesis. Comparative political economy, on the other hand, is rich in theoretical propositions that conceive of education as a political-economy problem, yet these theories have rarely been applied to the empirical study of individual-level educational access inequalities. A synthesis of both perspectives can generate testable theoretical propositions consistent with recent empirical findings. We also discuss ways of adjudicating between theories, perspectives on causation, and the value of description in the field.
Part II asks what actually happened and which mechanisms drove it. The evidence converges on the income barrier: changes in inequality track barrier parameters rather than the pace of enrollment growth, falling when the barrier fell and stagnating when real income growth stalled and de-commodifying policies were retrenched. Part II bridges the quasi-experimental causal literature from the economics of education with an institutional argument, using estimates of specific instruments’ distributional effects not as standalone findings but as inputs that adjudicate among rival theoretical accounts.
Part III asks who made it happen and how. Reconstructing the political construction of key instruments across the FHC, Lula, Dilma, Temer, and Bolsonaro administrations, it adjudicates three central debates raised by the trajectory — the relevant partisan cleavage, the causal role of non-partisan actors, and the dominance of private provision. Contributing to comparative political economy theories of education, where the dominant mode of engagement in the Brazilian literature (Gomes, 2024) has been confirmation rather than confrontation, it shows that governments of opposite partisan orientations produced convergent pro-enrollment trajectories but divergent distributional outcomes, proving that the decisive variable is not who governs but which subsidy instruments are adopted; that business associations and social movements exercised causal autonomy unaccommodated by partisan theories; and that private-sector dominance is rooted in fiscal path dependence rather than programmatic preference.
The Conclusion draws these findings together to synthesize what the Brazilian case implies for the comparative politics of educational redistribution. Throughout, Brazil enters the argument not as an anomaly to be explained away but as a diagnostic case: one that refines theories developed primarily for the more-studied rich democracies by exposing the mechanisms they leave unspecified.