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Since many of the private higher education institutions are for-profit, or highly
commercialized non-for-profit, many of them belong to the major business groups. For example,
UniverCidade (sic), which is a university center based in Rio de Janeiro, having the autonomy
without the interference from the Ministry of Education, provides courses at a 40% lower cost at
the expense of no research and fewer qualified teaching staff, successfully owning 27,000
students in 17 campuses through rapid expansion by means of branding in all types of media and
convenient locations around the city (McCowan, 2007). However, the principal of UniverCidade
(sic), Ronald Levinsohn, was notorious for manipulating and bankrupting the finance company.
What is interesting is that recent for-profit sector player Pitꢀgoras, by cooperating with US
education company Apollo in 2001, even involve previous Inter-American Development Bank
Chief Education advisor, Claudio de Moura Castro in its curriculum development. Pitꢀgoras
established its first HEI on the model of Apollo’s Phoenix University, mainly through
standardization, which targets towards quality instruction expansion while with low cost and
fewer high-level teachers (Rosenburg, 2002 as cited in McCowan, 2007).
Reasons behind the Growth in Private For-Profit Sector
There are several reasons contributing to the growth of private for-profit higher education
in Brazil. The most obvious motive behind is the push from the demand side. Due to the growth
of population in the age cohort for higher education, the rising enrollment in secondary education
and the need for higher education diplomas by in the labor market, there has been tremendous
increase in the need for higher education, not only from the students within age cohort for the
higher education but also those workers wishing to return to the higher education institutions.
The public sector could only address small proportion of this growing demand, since the growth
of public sector is quite slow or static as discussed at the beginning, largely owing to the lack of
investment and financing from the government.
Another motive behind comes from the market of private higher education, which has
gradually been viewed as an enticing area of investment by many of the entrepreneurs. As
estimated by Brazilian company Ideal Invest, the margin of private higher education would reach
US$10 billion from US$4 billion in the coming 7 years (McCowan, 2007), which kind of
provides a strategic suggestion to the businesses on entering the education market.
The third motive deals with the incentives at the policy levels, including tax exemption
and cheap loans for the developing industries, mostly influenced by the multi-lateral agencies
such as World Bank and International Monetary Fund, along with their neoliberal policy
recommendations of Washington Consensus, which principally focuses on structural adjustment,
shrinking of the state, privatization and supporting private enterprise and capital, etc. (Ribeiro,
2
005). However, these policy borrowing were not undertaken voluntarily by the Brazilian
government, but under the pressure and conditionality on receiving aid from World Bank. Since
the 1980s, with the withdrawal of multi-lateral organization UNESCO, bilateral donor the United
States and the United Kingdom on providing educational aid in Brazil, World Bank entered and
has become the largest international donor on education sector in Brazil (Leher, 1999 as cited in
McCowan, 2007). Largely dependent on the funding from World Bank to develop the education
system, Brazil has to adopt particular policies, and the policies targeted towards tertiary sector
include the diversion of state funding from higher to basic education, especially to the primary
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