Does a higher education policy for inclusion promote social mobility? The Brazilian Social Quota Law case

Resumo

The Work aims to examine how effective the Brazilian government’s quota admissions policy has been at promoting social mobility. We find that whilst the policy accomplishes students target from minority and lower socioeconomic backgrounds, the extent to which this will benefit social mobility is questionable. This is because quota students are concentrated in subjects of lower prestige and expected earnings, which typically require lower test scores for admittance. Therefore, that whilst a positive step in the right direction, quota policies need to be supplemented by reducing the outcome gap of disadvantaged students at earlier stages of the education system. For this analysis, we created an adversity index that aggregate a set of students’ socioeconomic background and ethnical profile variables, among others. We then use multiple regression approaches to identify the effects of the index and its variables on the students’ potential social mobility, which we proxy by subject-level average earnings.