The offering of bachelor’s degree enrollments and in-class courses in gaucho universities

Abstract

This article describes and problematize the offering of bachelor’s degree enrollments and courses, such as Pedagogy, Languages and Math, in the in-class modality, in public and private universities from the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the southern region of Brazil, in the context of strong official pressure for expanding of Brazilian universities. Considering the importance of these courses of policies of evaluation and educational formation for primary education and the official policies of expansion of superior education since the end of the 1990’s, this study is justified by the absence of researches focused on the impact of these policies in the case of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. It was used a quantitative and qualitative methodology from the data of Censos da Educação Superior (2000, 2007 and 2013). The data are interpreted from studies focused on superior and teachers’ education. From the analysis, it is observed that there was a drop in the total number of enrollments, in the courses studied, during the period of 2007-2013. However, while the drop was pretty significant in private universities, the public universities kept a growing number of enrollment, due to the creation of new public universities  in regions of the state uninhabited by the federal sphere and, yet, due to the expansion of offering of courses and public university vacancies already existent. It is also noticed the strong presence of private universities in the offering of courses studied, especially in the metropolitan region of the state, due to be a region of bigger economic development and population concentration. On the other hand, the public universities are innovating in the poorer and more remote regions of the state.