Opinion – Cida Bento: Strengthen, expand and improve the quota system

In 2022, the Quota Law, a successful affirmative action policy, can be reviewed by the National Congress. A policy that has been facing attacks in our parliament, through projects that aim to extinguish or de-characterize it.

Affirmative actions and quota policies in higher education institutions are the result of the struggle of the black movement against racism and for justice in the treatment of the population that has historically been and is discriminated against.

The legislation determines a minimum of 50% of reserved places for students who attended high school in public schools. Half of these vacancies should be reserved for students with a family income of up to 1.5 minimum wage per capita, as well as for black, brown and indigenous people, with a percentage that varies according to the proportion of these populations in each federative unit.

As of 2016, the law was amended to include persons with disabilities. The results of an important study published in 2022, evaluating quota policy, are encouraging.

The study was coordinated by UFRJ’s Lepes (Laboratory of Studies and Research in Higher Education) and by Ação Educativa.

The study reveals a significant increase in the participation of new quota holders between 2010 and 2019. Today it is around 30%. It notes that quota students evade less from undergraduate courses than non-quota students. It shows a systematic growth of enrollments in the group that combines the characteristics: public schools, low-income, black, brown and indigenous.

Another study, carried out by Sales Augusto Santos and Matheus Silva Freitas and published in the Revista Brasileira de História & Ciências Sociais in 2021, shows that the quota system did not bring about violent racial conflicts on university campuses, as intellectual opponents of this system predicted.

The research they carried out with 69 federal universities (74.80% of the total), as well as the documentary survey, finds that in 100% of the responses, the occurrence of violent racial conflicts on their campuses is not confirmed.

The authors point out that the historian George Reid Andrews (1998) stressed that white people from the middle and upper classes in Brazil know that they live in a society with serious problems arising from racial discrimination against the black population. Therefore, they always fear that blacks will one day take revenge and anticipate the occurrence of racial conflicts.

Finally, it is worth highlighting some of the recommendations of the studies cited, in particular the first: expanding and qualifying the institutionalization of affirmative action policies; that universities develop an ethnic-racial cut in teaching, research, extension and management; that they carry out training programs for coordinators, teachers and technicians on the Quota Law and on anti-racist education; that they monitor the quota system and listen to the entire university community, in particular students; that Law No. 12,990/2014 be extended, which reserves 20% of vacancies in public tenders and that quotas be extended to postgraduate courses; that anti-racist education reaches the contents of subjects and curricular activities of the courses and that in the evaluation of the operating conditions of universities this issue is considered.

They also emphasize that the quotas must contemplate curricular diversification involving Afro-Brazilian, African and indigenous matrices, among others, and that it is essential to guarantee the public availability of data that consider the socioeconomic dimension and race/color per course.

They point to the need to expand the notion of permanence in university policies involving not only scholarships and financial aid, but also reception, active listening, access to foreign language courses, among others.

The results show that quota students recognize and value the opportunities they achieve. If that’s the case, we should all defend the quota system too.