Opinion – Samuel Pessôa: Bad change in ProUni

The University for All Program, known as Pro-Uni, was established in 2005 with the objective of demanding that private higher education institutions (HEIs) benefit from tax exemptions
—Corporate Income Tax, Social Contribution on Net Income and Social Contribution to Social Security Financing—, return these benefits to society through free places for low-income people.

ProUni is a great public policy. It represents a model of public and private partnership in the educational area. The design was a real Columbus egg of the then minister Fernando Haddad, which had the prompt support of Paulo Renato, former FHC minister. Toucans recognized the merit of the program and supported it. At the time, I was an advisor to senator Tasso Jereissati and I recommended the vote in favor of Law 11.096. The public servants’ corporations linked to federal universities, generally supporters of PT governments, were not at all satisfied.

For a public policy to work, it is essential that it has the right focus. In this case, that the granting of scholarships meets social criteria. For example, it doesn’t make sense for a scholarship under ProUni to be awarded to a child of a professor at the IES. It is perfectly reasonable that it is part of the IES human resources (HR) policy to grant scholarships to the children of teachers, but not in the scholarship quota in exchange for tax exemption.

ProUni has two eligibility criteria: income and the student is from the public network. In the first case, the limit for the partial scholarship is up to three minimum wages of household income per capita. It is worth remembering that 90% of Brazilians have an income lower than that. The income limit for the full scholarship is up to 1.5 minimum wages of per capita household income, which qualify 75% of the Brazilian population.

President Bolsonaro has just sent a provisional measure that eliminates the second criterion, the main guarantee of the program’s focus: the student having attended high school in the public network.

Since it is very difficult to audit the income criterion, the policy’s focus depends on whether the program is exclusively applied to students in the public network or students who attended the private network with a full scholarship.
Hopefully the National Congress will reject the MP and reinstate ProUni under the terms of the 2005 legislation.

My assiduous reader and fierce critic Ricardo Knudsen questioned the information on public health spending in China in last week’s column. According to the World Bank database, public spending on health in China is 5.4% of GDP, not 1.8% as reported.

The number I reported refers to public spending (I downloaded the data from the Ceic database), while the database that Ricardo consulted refers to total public and private spending. The bulk of healthcare spending is private. As I argued in the column, the Asian growth model does not envisage building a welfare state.