This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.
Host: Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE) and Centre for Multilevel Modelling (CMM)
Speaker: Flavio Carvalhaes (Associate Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
This presentation will offer a comprehensive overview of the Brazilian educational system, demonstrating how vast secondary and administrative data sources can be leveraged for its analysis. While Brazil possesses extensive educational data with diverse designs and coverages, this talk will focus specifically on higher education.
I will explore how understanding educational supply is critical in systems with significant private sector involvement. The Brazilian higher education landscape serves as a compelling case study, where expansion and massification have been overwhelmingly driven by for-profit market actors. This market has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last two decades, marked by processes of financialization and oligopolization. Today, a small number of large educational conglomerates dominate, enrolling millions of students, a majority of whom now pursue their degrees through online learning.
The presentation will rely on previous and new work to document this transformation, showcasing how different data sources were integrated to build a comprehensive picture that includes (i) organizational-level secondary data from educational censuses, (ii) regulatory data tracking the dynamics of mergers, acquisitions, and closures of higher education institutions, (iii) Internal Revenue Service data to accurately map the shareholder composition of the corporations controlling the higher education market. By connecting these disparate datasets, we can achieve a more precise understanding of the market structure and the key players shaping the future of higher education in Brazil.
Flavio Carvalhaes is an Associate Professor at the Sociology Department at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Professor Carvalhaes has developed research in the areas of social inequality, perceptions of wealth and inequality, educational stratification, higher education expansion and comparative and international education.
His recent publications include "Higher Education Expansion and Diversification: Privatization, Distance Learning, and Market Concentration in Brazil, 2002–2016"; and "Decomposing Heterogeneity in Inequality of Educational Opportunities: Family Income and Academic Performance in Brazilian Higher Education”.
Beyond academia, prof. Carvalhaes has acted as an advisor in Brazil to the National Prosecutor Office, the Ministry of Education, and the National Bureau of Educational Statistics, among others. He is currently responsible for coordinating a series of studies about policy relevant topics for Brazil's Ministry of Education and he also serves as a researcher in an inter-ministry initiative at the national level that investigates racial and socioeconomic school segregation.
