Programa de Financiamento Estudantil (FIES) no contexto do Plano Nacional de Educação (2014-2024): uma análise da expansão e privatização do ensino superior no Brasil e no Rio Grande do Norte

Abstract

This research’s goal is analyze the Student Financing Program implemented in the Partido dos Trabalhadores governements in the period from 2003 to 2016, evidencing their contributions to the achievement of Goal 12 of the PNE (2014-2024) and to the privatization of higher educations in Brazil and Rio Grande do Norte. It starts from the premise that were implemented in this period, although emerging as a strategy to expand acess to higher education and the achievement of Goal 12 of the National Education Plan have also contributed to the intensification of the privatization process of higher education. As a theoretical framework, the research uses historical-dialectival materialism, understanding the phenomenon of the expansion of higher education as complex and multifaceted, being necessary to understand totality and contradiction. As methological procedures, the work makes use of a qualitative approach on document analysis, bibliographic review and statistical data analysis made available by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira and also by National Education Development fund. A documentar analysis that show us the factors, of a political and economic order, had repercussion in the current educational scenario and were strongly influenced by international standards. A bibliographic review deepens the critical analyzes about the phenomena that conditioned and involved the object of study, added this is the data analysis that allow us to investigate how the expansion and privatization of higher education in Brazil and Rio Grande do Norte materialized. The study made it possible to identify that the expansion of higher education in the country does not only have a noble purpose of generating greater conditions of acess and permanence for students, it is also a phenomenon that is inserted in the capitalist logic, absorbing contours that favor the reproduction of capital. In this context, FIES emerges as a program capable of allowing advances in terms of acess to higher education and, at the same time, capable of guaranteeing importante streghthening conditions for the private and mercantilista educational sector, further consolidating this sector as the largest provider of this level of teaching. The data also shows that the private sector has expanded significantly in Brazil and that this trend was accompanied by the Rio Grande do Norte.This expansion was caused by the participation of FIES, wich, by adopting privatist characteristic, was responsible for submitting even more the country’s higher education to capitalist logic, implying not only a numerical hegemony of the private sector, but also in reducing the delimitation of borders between the public and private spheres, considering that part of the advance of the private sector was driven by financial resourcers of public order.