Higher-Education Tuition Prices Relative to Inflation and the Minimum Wage

IPCA

SIDRA

Mensalidades

Higher-education tuition price series relative to overall consumer prices and to the minimum wage.

Published

July 6, 2026

Overview

This figure tracks how the cost of higher-education tuition in Brazil moved relative to two benchmarks since 1999: overall consumer price inflation, and the minimum wage. It shows whether tuition became more or less expensive in real terms, and, separately, whether it became more or less affordable relative to the wage floor that a large share of Brazilian households’ income is anchored to.

Methodology

Both series track the higher-education tuition subitem of the IPCA, Brazil’s headline consumer price index, spliced from the four vintages of the subitem-level SIDRA series (tables 655, 2938, 1419, and 7060) and expressed as a cumulative index with August 1999 = 100. The blue series deflates cumulative tuition readjustments by the headline IPCA: values above 100 indicate tuition rose faster than overall consumer prices after August 1999. The orange series divides the same tuition index by the nominal minimum wage (IPEADATA series MTE12_SALMIN12), measuring how the cost of the same tuition bill evolved relative to the wage floor. The IPCA subitem is a price-change index computed over a fixed panel of institutions: it measures readjustment, not the price level or the average market ticket, and does not capture compositional cheapening through migration toward distance learning and lower-priced institutions. In real terms, tuition tracked or exceeded headline inflation until 2020 and fell below the 1999 benchmark only after the nominal tuition cuts of 2021; relative to the minimum wage, tuition fell by roughly 60%, with most of the decline concentrated in 2001–2012.

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to tertiary education in Brazil: Household incomes, reforming policies, and the politics of who gets in (1990s–2020s) [Unpublished master’s thesis].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, July 6). Higher-education tuition prices relative to inflation and the minimum wage [Figure and reproducible pipeline]. Open Data Analysis. https://mancano-tales.github.io/open-data-analysis/posts/ipca-mensalidade-curso-superior/

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_ipca_mensalidade_curso_superior,
  author       = {Man\c{c}ano, Tales},
  title        = {Higher-education tuition prices relative to inflation and the minimum wage},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = jul,
  howpublished = {Open Data Analysis, \url{https://mancano-tales.github.io/open-data-analysis/posts/ipca-mensalidade-curso-superior/}},
  note         = {Figure and reproducible pipeline. Source code: \url{https://github.com/mancano-tales/open-data-analysis}, folder posts/ipca-mensalidade-curso-superior/. 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/ipca-mensalidade-curso-superior/).

Pipeline

Scripts for this analysis:

Plotting: plot.R — writes the figure to output/figures/ipca-mensalidade-curso-superior/ — compare it with this post’s thumbnail.png
Upstream pipeline: self-contained — downloads the IPCA sub-item series (SIDRA) and the minimum wage (IPEADATA) and caches them in data-raw/ipca-mensalidades/output/. It is the same script as shared-pipeline/ipca/010_IPCA_Curso_Superior_Series.R.

Reproducibility

Tier: A

This pipeline uses only public data, accessible via package/API without any credential (PNADcIBGE, censobr, sidrar, ipeadatar). Run the scripts in shared-pipeline/ in numeric order to reconstruct the intermediate data.