Expansion and Composition of Undergraduate Enrollment, 1980–2024

Long-run expansion and sector composition of undergraduate enrollment in Brazil, 1980–2024.

Overview

This figure shows the long-run expansion of Brazilian undergraduate enrollment from 1980 to 2024, broken down by administrative category — public federal, public state, public municipal, and private institutions. It provides the deepest historical backdrop in this catalog, reaching back well before the PNAD/PNADC microdata pipelines used elsewhere, to trace how the balance between public and private higher education shifted over four and a half decades.

Methodology

Long-run series (1980–2024) of total undergraduate enrollment and its composition by administrative category (public federal, public state, public municipal, private), drawing on the educabr2 R package, which assembles historical Brazilian higher-education statistics from INEP’s Higher Education Census and its predecessor surveys (Censo do Ensino Superior, Sinopses Estatísticas) into a single harmonized long-run series. The period before INEP’s modern microdata era (pre-1995) is not covered by any of the PNAD/PNADC/CENSUP pipelines used elsewhere in this repository.

How to Cite

If you use this figure or the pipeline behind it, please cite both the dissertation and this specific analysis. References follow APA 7th edition.

Dissertation (in preparation; the entry will be updated after the defense):

Mançano, T. (2026). Inequality in access to tertiary education in Brazil: Household incomes, reforming policies, and the politics of who gets in (1990s–2020s) [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of São Paulo.

This figure and pipeline:

Mançano, T. (2026, August 27). Expansion and composition of undergraduate enrollment, 1980–2024 [Figure and reproducible pipeline]. Open Data Analysis. https://mancano-tales.github.io/open-data-analysis/posts/expansao-composicao-matriculas/

In text: (Mançano, 2026) — when citing several analyses from this catalog in the same work, APA distinguishes them as 2026a, 2026b, … in the order they appear in the reference list.

BibTeX:

@mastersthesis{Mancano2026Thesis,
  author = {Man\c{c}ano, Tales},
  title  = {Inequality in Access to Tertiary Education in Brazil: Household
            Incomes, Reforming Policies, and the Politics of Who Gets In
            (1990s--2020s)},
  school = {University of S\~{a}o Paulo},
  year   = {2026},
  type   = {Master's thesis},
  note   = {Unpublished; Graduate Program in Political Science}
}

@misc{Mancano2026_expansao_composicao_matriculas,
  author       = {Man\c{c}ano, Tales},
  title        = {Expansion and composition of undergraduate enrollment, 1980--2024},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = aug,
  howpublished = {Open Data Analysis, \url{https://mancano-tales.github.io/open-data-analysis/posts/expansao-composicao-matriculas/}},
  note         = {Figure and reproducible pipeline. Source code: \url{https://github.com/mancano-tales/open-data-analysis}, folder posts/expansao-composicao-matriculas/. Accessed YYYY-MM-DD}
}

A permanent version (Git tag + Zenodo DOI) will be linked here once the dissertation is defended; until then, cite the page URL above and add the date you accessed it (source code: https://github.com/mancano-tales/open-data-analysis, folder posts/expansao-composicao-matriculas/).

Pipeline

Scripts for this analysis:

• Plotting: plot.R — writes the figure to output/figures/expansao-composicao-matriculas/ — compare it with this post’s thumbnail.png
• Upstream pipeline: no upstream script in this repository — on first run it downloads the source spreadsheet data_tertiary_v6_clean.xlsx from the public educabr2 repository (data-raw/sources/tertiary_multisource/) into data-raw/educabr2/.

Reproducibility

Tier: A (cross-repo)

This figure depends on the public educabr2 repository: plot.R downloads the source spreadsheet (data-raw/sources/tertiary_multisource/data_tertiary_v6_clean.xlsx) from it on first run — no credential and no manual download required.