Catholic institutions of higher education in a scenario dominated by educational oligopolyAbstract
Alongside public institutions, Catholic institutions were dominant in the Brazilian higher education system. However, in the last 30 years, the scenario has been completely reconfigured, with the entry of educational oligopolies into the higher education system. The objective of this bibliographic and documentary research is to understand the relevance of Catholic institutions in the current Brazilian educational scenario, especially based on quantitative data obtained from the High Education Census. The results indicate that, in 2023, Catholic institutions were responsible for only 3.4% of enrollments in the system; however, although quantitatively they are not as representative, a closer look allows us to infer that they still prioritize the quality of education, despite the strong competition they face from the private sector for profit.
Keywords
Higher Education; Catholic Institutions
Resumo
Ao lado das públicas, as instituições católicas foram dominantes no sistema de educação superior brasileiro. Contudo, nos últimos 30 anos, o cenário foi totalmente reconfigurado com a entrada de oligopólios educacionais no sistema de educação superior. O objetivo desta pesquisa bibliográfica e documental é compreender a relevância das instituições católicas no atual cenário educacional brasileiro, especialmente a partir de dados quantitativos obtidos do Censo da Educação Superior. Os resultados indicam que as instituições católicas eram responsáveis, em 2023, por apenas 3,4% das matrículas do sistema; contudo, ainda que quantitativamente não sejam tão representativas, um olhar mais atento permite inferir que ainda primam pela qualidade da formação, apesar da forte concorrência que sofrem do setor com finalidade lucrativa.
Palavras-chave
Educação Superior; Instituições Católicas
Resumen
Junto a las instituciones públicas, las instituciones católicas fueron dominantes en el sistema de educación superior brasileño. Sin embargo, en los últimos 30 años el escenario se ha reconfigurado por completo, con la entrada de los oligopolios educativos en el sistema de educación superior. El objetivo de esta investigación bibliográfica y documental es comprender la relevancia de las instituciones católicas en el actual escenario educativo brasileño, especialmente con base en datos cuantitativos obtenidos del Censo de Educación. Los resultados indican que las instituciones católicas fueron responsables, en 2023, de solo el 3,4% de las matrículas del sistema; Sin embargo, aunque cuantitativamente no son tan representativos, una mirada más cercana permite inferir que aún se destacan por la calidad de la formación, a pesar de la fuerte competencia que enfrentan por parte del sector privado en busca de ganancias.
Palabras-clave
Educación superior; Instituciones católicas
Introduction
Catholic institutions (CI) of higher education have long played a significant role in the Brazilian system; the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro1, founded in the 1940s through the consolidation of independent schools, was the first Catholic university and one of the five universities operating in Brazil during that decade (Cunha, 2007). Along with other nonprofit institutions (including some affiliated with different religious traditions), Catholic institutions were leading actors within Brazil’s private higher education sector until the end of the 20th century. However, this landscape changed entirely with the enactment of the current Law of Lines of Direction and Bases of the Education, the LDB (Brasil, 1996), followed by Decree No. 2,306 (Brasil, 1997), which authorized the participation of for-profit corporations in the higher education sector (Sampaio, 2014). This major regulatory shift marked the beginning of a restructuring process in the private system, aligned with an international policy orientation associated with the Washington Consensus (1989), designed to expand access to higher education in emerging economies such as Brazil.
According to data from the Higher Education Census (Inep, 2024) and the National Association of Catholic Education in Brazil (ANEC), in 2023, the reconfiguration of the educational landscape resulted in a scenario in which, out of a total of 2,580 higher education institutions (HEIs), only 98 were identified as Catholic. From being leading actors in the private system until the end of the 20th century, less than thirty years after the enactment of the current LDB, CIs now function as secondary players, though they still maintaining a significant role within the educational landscape, especially for still being associated with standards of educational quality, at least in the public eye.
To identify these 98 CIs, the study adopted ANEC’s data, which classify any institution maintained by a diocese, religious congregation, or institute of consecrated life affiliated with the Catholic Church, as Catholic and the HEIs were matched to the Higher Education Census microdata (Inep, 2024) through their INEP codes.
Focusing specifically on Catholic higher education institutions and drawing on the 2023 microdata from the Higher Education Census (Inep, 2024), this article examines their representation and relevance within the current Brazilian educational landscape, controlled by educational oligopolies—namely, corporate structures that accumulate market share (Zuccarelli et al., 2024). It is therefore a bibliographic and, above all, documentary study designed to understand the current state of Catholic education in Brazil.
By shedding light on a specific segment of the private higher education system and based on quantitative data, the research indicates that Catholic institutions follow an academic model much closer to that of public institutions, distancing themselves from the model adopted by private for-profit institutions.
The article is organized into four sections, in addition to this introduction and the final considerations. The first section contextualizes the reconfiguration of the higher education system that unfolded after the current LDB, showcasing that the system’s expansion was driven by the private sector, especially corporate oligopolies. The second section presents the tax benefits extended to private for-profit institutions and that had been exclusive to nonprofit institutions (including Catholic ones) until the implementation of the University for All Program (Programa Universidade Para Todos – PROUNI). The third section briefly outlines the profile of educational oligopolies, which currently hold an extremely significant share of the system’s enrollments. The fourth section focuses on selected quantitative data regarding Catholic higher education institutions while comparatively analyzing them.
The reconfiguration of the higher education system after the 1996 Law of Lines of Direction and Bases of the Education (LDB)
A historical milestone of Brazil’s democratic transition, the Federal Constitution (Brasil, 1988) established education as a social right, and following its lead, the current LDB was enacted eight years later. This ordinary statute is also regarded as the starting point for implementing policies to expand access to higher education in Brazil, which until then had maintained an elitist structure that enabled access only for a few, typically drawn from more privileged sectors of the population. In this regard, Garcia et al. (2021) state that, beginning with this law, higher education entered “a new cycle of normative transformations that resulted in significant morphological changes in its institutional form, in a process that intensified the system’s diversification and differentiation” (p. 6).
Before the enactment of the current LDB in 1996, there were 922 higher education institutions (HEIs) in Brazil; of which, 211 were public and 711 private. Private HEIs, in turn, were legally organized as nonprofit associations or foundations that reinvested all financial income into their core activities, without any possibility of distributing potential profits among their members or administrators. This structure reflected the historical moment in which the first private institutions emerged in Brazil in the first half of the 20th century (Cunha, 2007), predominantly founded as confessional initiatives.
Just under a year after the publication of the LDB, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) enacted Decree No. 2,306 (Brasil, 1997), which, through its very first article, permitted that for-profit institutions could also operate within the system and therefore engage in the sector as a business, distributing positive financial results to their partners and shareholders. By allowing the distribution of profit in the provision of educational services, the decree made it possible for the system to expand exponentially, since “after the decree, the institutions themselves became commodities which could be sold or purchased” (Sampaio, 2014, p. 156).
Unlike what took place with the Federal Constitution and the LDB—both of which underwent a legislative process of debate and voting in the National Congress—decrees are acts issued exclusively by the President of the Republic (pursuant to Article 84, item VI, of the Federal Constitution) and are not subject to deliberation by the Legislative Branch. Even though the Executive Branch has the authority to issue regulatory norms through decrees, this significant regulatory change authorizing the entry of for-profit corporations into the higher education system was defined within the Presidential Office without any consideration by the National Congress.
With this measure, the entire landscape was reshaped (Tagliari, 2022), setting in motion a process of market oligopolization (Seki, 2021) that, nearly three decades later, has resulted in a private higher education sector largely controlled by investor-backed educational corporations.
At the same time, the higher education system began an unprecedented process of expansion, marked by a significant increase in the number of private HEIs and, consequently, in available programs and seats. Massification took root as the private sector grew, gradually widening access to higher education for different segments of the population and making it so that participation “is no longer restricted to small groups, generally those best socially positioned within a given society. That is, it is no longer elitist, in the strict sense” (Almeida, 2014, p. 28). If there were 711 private HEIs in 1996, all of them nonprofit, 27 years later, in 2023, that figure rose to 2,264, of which 1,473 were for-profit and 791 nonprofit (Inep, 2024).
The private higher education system, which had been structured around foundations and associations (especially confessional entities) until 1996, fully opened to new actors who rapidly capitalized on this market opportunity and reshaped the sector. As Pinto (2016) observes, “the hegemony of confessional schools in the private sector is progressively replaced by the entry of private schools organized as commercial companies oriented toward profit” (p. 136).
These shifts also decisively changed the profile of students in Brazilian higher education in less than three decades. From what had been a largely elite system, access to higher education became massified (Trow, 2005), increasing student participation at this level of education. Furthermore, with the implementation of public policies such as the University for All Program (PROUNI), the Student Financing Fund for Higher Education (FIES), the Support Program for the Restructuring and Expansion of Federal Universities (REUNI), and racial quota policies, , the system became more diverse, incorporating students from low-income families. In this context, while in 1996—when the current LDB was enacted—there were 1.87 million students (60% of them in private institutions), 27 years later, in 2023, that number reached 9.96 million (almost 80% of them in the private sector), as shown in Table 1.
As Table 1 indicates, the system expanded with the creation of a substantial number of private HEIs; while enrollment in the public sector did not increase at a comparable rate. However, whereas in 1996 all students in the private higher education system were enrolled in nonprofit institutions, by 2023 enrollment had become concentrated in for-profit institutions, as shown in Table 2.
Enrollments in Private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Brazil, in thousands, disaggregated by for-profit or nonprofit status
Over the course of three decades, system growth occurred almost exclusively through the for-profit sector; while in 1996 nonprofit HEIs enrolled 1.13 million students, by 2023 they registered only a modest increase of 600 thousand students, whereas educational corporations—which had no presence in the higher education system prior to 1996—accounted for 78% of private-sector enrollments in 2023.
The reconfiguration of the private higher education system unfolded not only in the composition of the student body but also in the very types of institutions operating within it. In just under three decades, nonprofit institutions shifted from leading actors—or, more accurately, sole actors in a monologue—to secondary figures within a system that not only prioritized expanding enrollments through the private sector but also, particularly within that sector, advanced growth driven by the market, that is, by institutions that treat education as a business. To that end, a series of public policies and regulatory measures were developed so that tax benefits previously (and still) granted to nonprofit institutions would also be extended to for-profit providers operating in the educational market, as will be shown in the next section.
On the tax benefits granted to private for-profit institutions
Created in 2005 during the first administration of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010), PROUNI extended many of the tax benefits previously restricted to nonprofit institutions to for-profit institutions that joined the Program.
Private for-profit HEIs are characterized primarily by their ability to distribute dividends (profits) to partners or shareholders. They are organized as business corporations, either publicly traded or closely held. Publicly traded corporations (also known as joint-stock companies) have their capital split into shares that are freely traded on the stock exchange, whose nominal value fluctuates constantly in response to expectations of profitability. Their major competitive advantage is the ability to trade shares on the market (selling them to investors) and thereby secure financial contributions to support business strategies. Shareholders—either partners or investors—periodically receive distributions of the corporation’s profits, and the higher the expected return, the greater the nominal appreciation of each share. Closely held corporations, in turn, do not have their capital traded on the stock exchange and are therefore less exposed to market volatility. Ownership is generally concentrated among a small number of individuals (partners) who, as in publicly traded corporations, receive periodic dividends proportional to the company’s profitability. As their capital is not publicly traded, such companies cannot freely raise funds on the market, and any financial contributions must come from their own partners or from public or private financing.
A second group consists of nonprofit legal entities, typically established as foundations or associations. This legal category encompasses both confessional HEIs and Community Higher Education Institutions (CHEIs), which are regulated by Law No. 12,881 (Brasil, 2013). The defining feature of foundations and associations is the prohibition on distributing positive financial results (or profits) from their operations among members, such that all surpluses must necessarily be reinvested in their social purposes. Motivated by an altruistic mission, these legal entities enjoy various tax benefits in Brazil, namely: exemption from taxes on property, income, or services, pursuant to Article 9, item IV of the National Tax Code (Brasil, 1966), provided they comply with the following fiscal requirements (Art. 14): (a) they do not distribute any portion of their assets or income under any circumstance; (b) they apply all their resources within the country to maintain their institutional objectives; (c) they keep accounting records of revenues and expenses in books organized according to the formalities necessary to ensure accuracy.
Within the category of nonprofit legal entities, there is also the beneficent entity, which, in addition to meeting all legal requirements of its category, is publicly recognized as providing significant educational, social-assistance, or health services to society, much of it free of charge. When such an entity satisfies the legal criteria, the government grants it the Certification of Beneficent Social Assistance Entity (Certificado de Entidade Beneficente de Assistência Social – CEBAS), which, in turn, ensures the tax benefit of immunity from social-security contributions (Article 194, Paragraph 7 of the Federal Constitution).
Box 1 lists the tax benefits associated with each type of legal entity operating within the Brazilian private educational market, before and after joining PROUNI.
As Box 1 indicates, PROUNI did not create any new tax incentives for private nonprofit and beneficent HEIs—including Catholic Institutions (CIs)—so their decision to join the Program was driven instead by the expectation of increased visibility and integration into a more nationally coordinated system of seat allocation, which linked their philanthropic obligations, associated with tax immunity, to the Program’s guidelines as established in Law 11,096 (Brasil, 2005). In practice, the tuition waivers these institutions had previously offered through their own internal scholarship processes came to be directed to students selected by the Program2. For private for-profit HEIs, however, PROUNI generated a twofold benefit, as it enabled them to fill part of their unused seats and, more importantly, granted them access to many of the tax advantages that had formerly been available only to nonprofit institutions.
Participation in PROUNI afforded for-profit HEIs nearly the same tax benefits and therefore reduced their liabilities related to Corporate Income Tax (Imposto de Renda de Pessoa Jurídica – IRPJ), Social Contribution on Net Profit (Contribuição Sobre o Lucro Líquido – CSLL), the Social Security Contribution (Contribuição Social para Financiamento da Seguridade Social – Cofins), and the Social Integration Program (Programa de Integração Social – PIS) Contribution. Prior to PRIOUNI, these tax benefits had been exclusive to nonprofit institutions (including Catholic Institutions), which consequently lost the major competitive advantage of being able to charge tuition subject to lower tax-incidence costs.
The formation of educational oligopolies
With the opening of the higher education system to for-profit participation, business groups strengthened over the span of less than three decades to the point that they now function as oligopolies—a market structure in which a small number of companies exert significant control over a segment, producing a level of concentration that threatens free competition. The expansion of these educational oligopolies was driven by foreign capital investment and the listing of corporate shares on the stock exchange. Accordingly, in the first half of 2025, five educational corporations had shares freely traded in the so-called “new market” on the Brazilian stock exchange: Cogna Educacional, Yduqs Participações, Ser Educacional, Cruzeiro do Sul Educacional, and Ânima Educação. These corporations have their capital divided into shares traded on the market, allowing anyone to purchase them and thereby become shareholders eligible to receive dividends whenever the company posts profitable business results.
Another factor reinforcing the strength of these educational oligopolies was the financialization accelerated by FIES in the 2010s, when large volumes of public resources were transferred to private HEIs (Scudeler & Tassoni, 2023). With significant public funds directed to these groups, state financing became part of a broader set of policy actions aimed at expanding and diversifying access to higher education and guided by the ambitious enrollment-expansion targets of the 2014 Brazilian Plan for Education (Plano Nacional de Educação, PNE).
This period is marked by intense competition and increasing managerial professionalization, prioritizing student recruitment and cost reduction, often at the expense of teaching and research activities. As oligopolization intensified, enrollments grew increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few corporate groups, weakening the diversification of the educational system (Zuccarelli et al., 2024).
Typically led by administrators with academic training but limited market experience, nonprofit HEIs struggle to match the aggressiveness and speed of corporate-sector educational executives (Sampaio, 2014; Scudeler et al., 2023). In this context, they struggle amid a continuous process of student loss and sustainability crises, as noted in a study by Tagliari (2022): “the pressure exerted by the for-profit subsystem has triggered the failure of nonprofit private institutions, especially small, family-run establishments” (p. 39).
Catholic HEIs, in particular, have felt these effects, as will be discussed in the next section.
Catholic Higher Education Institutions
Confessional institutions are affiliated with a specific religious tradition and conduct their activities and operations in accordance with that faith. Brazil is among the countries with the largest Catholic population in the world, and the first confessional higher education institutions in the country were Catholic.
The LDB has always acknowledged the existence of confessional institutions. In its original formulation, confessional education appeared as an administrative category, which granted it certain representational prerogatives and allowed its data to be classified separately in educational statistics. In 2019, however, with the enactment of Law 13,868 (Brasil, 2019), administrative categories were streamlined to only three: public institutions, private institutions, and community institutions. As a result of this change, confessional institutions came to be listed in the LDB merely as a designation applicable to either private or community institutions.
Based on ANEC data and the 2023 Higher Education Census (Inep, 2024), it is clear that Brazil’s 98 Catholic higher education institutions represent 3.8% of the system, as shown in Table 3, which is composed predominantly of private HEIs (83.95%).
Number and percentage of institutional types in 2023, disaggregated by public, private, and private confessional institutions
Table 3 also presents the institutional types of HEIs, the vast majority of which operate as standalone colleges (75.2%), many of them (1,791 out of 2,580) within the private sector. Although Catholic Institutions (CIs) likewise appear predominantly as standalone colleges (58.2%), there is a substantial presence of universities and college centers—organizational models more strongly oriented toward research and extension, in accordance with the tripartite mandate established in Article 207 of the Federal Constitution. Indeed, among Catholic institutions, 18.4% are universities and 23.5% are college centers, whereas across the private HEI sector, 80.1% are structured as standalone colleges. It is also notable that although CIs constitute only 4.3% of the private system, they account for 20.2% of Brazilian private universities: of the 89 private universities in Brazil in 2023, 18 were CIs.
Even though most CIs operate as standalone colleges (58.1%), there is a significant proportion of college centers and universities—organizational models that engage in research and are required to maintain at least 20% of their faculty in full-time positions and ensure that one-third hold at least a master’s degree.
Considering the nearly 10 million students enrolled in the Brazilian higher education system in 2023 (Inep, 2024), only 3.4% are enrolled in Catholic institutions, as shown in Table 4.
Number of Faculty and Enrollments in 2023, disaggregated among Public, Private, and Private Catholic Institutions, as well as the proportional number of students per faculty member
When examining only the private sector, which comprises 79.3% of total enrollments, Catholic Institutions (CIs) account for 4.3% of these enrollments—a figure that closely matches their share within the private system (3.8%), as indicated in Table 3. Nevertheless, although they represent just 4.3% of enrollments in the private sector, CIs employ 19,076 faculty members, corresponding to 12.7% of the private-sector professoriate; in relation to the total number of faculty in Brazilian higher education, 5.8% teach in Cis, leading to a student–faculty ratio that resembles that of public institutions, as shown in Table 4: whereas private institutions outside the CI group average 58 students per instructor, public institutions average 12 students per instructor, and CIs average 18 students per instructor.
Table 5, in turn, presents the distribution of faculty academic credentials, and here again the profile of CIs aligns more closely with that of public HEIs, given the high proportion of faculty holding master’s and doctoral degrees: 95% of faculty in public institutions hold a master’s or doctoral degree, compared with 88% in CIs; among private HEIs excluding Catholic institutions, this percentage drops to 76%.
Percentage distribution of faculty qualifications in 2023, disaggregated among Public, Private, and Private Catholic Institutions
In turn, the employment structure of Catholic Institutions is very similar to that of other private HEIs, as shown in Table 6. In Catholic institutions, 29.2% of faculty members hold full-time positions and 40% work part-time—figures that closely mirror those of other private HEIs (27.5% and 41.9%, respectively) and substantially differ from the proportions found in the public sector (92.3% and 7.5%, respectively).
Percentage distribution of faculty according to employment status in 2023, disaggregated among Public, Private, and Private Catholic Institutions
Certainly, the student–faculty ratio observed in Catholic Institutions, along with the higher academic credentials of their faculty—indicators much more closely aligned with those of the public sector—stem from two main factors: first, especially in comparison with for-profit private HEIs, CIs have a stronger commitment to instructional quality, reflected in the fact that many are structured as universities (18.4%) and college centers (23.5%), as shown in Table 3, and in the substantially higher percentage of faculty holding doctoral degrees (48%) relative to other private HEIs (30%), as indicated in Table 5; second, as an additional decisive factor, enrollments in CIs are heavily concentrated in on-campus programs—unlike other private HEIs, which maintain a large share of students in Distance Learning (EaD) programs, a modality that now comprises nearly half of all enrollments in the Brazilian higher education system (Inep, 2024). By prioritizing on-campus offerings over distance-learning programs, CIs again align themselves with the public sector and distance themselves from the predominant recruitment model used by for-profit institutions, which rely heavily on EaD programs with significantly lower tuition fees.
In this context, within a total of 7.9 million students enrolled in the private higher education system, only 337,910 are enrolled in Catholic Institutions; of these, 73,363 are in distance-learning programs, accounting for 21.7% of CI enrollments, while the majority of their students (78.3%) are enrolled in on-campus programs, as shown in Table 7; when examining only the private system, excluding Catholic Institutions, this distribution is entirely inverted: among 7.5 million enrollments, 61.2% of students are in distance-learning programs.
Percentage distribution of faculty according to employment status in 2023, disaggregated among Public, Private, and Private Catholic Institutions
The larger share of students enrolled in EaD programs in private HEIs stems from a set of commercial strategies implemented by these institutions to retain students from more vulnerable socioeconomic backgrounds who cannot afford tuition for on-campus programs. According to Scudeler and Tassoni (2023), this shift was precipitated by the weakening of FIES beginning in the second half of the 2010s, given that educational oligopolies had previously been heavily dependent on public funding. With the adoption of fiscal-austerity measures, there was a cut on the budget available for FIES, and the sector experienced a decline in student recruitment, particularly among low-income populations. In this context:
In the absence of public policies meant to enabling access to and permanence in higher education for students with vulnerable socioeconomic profiles, the educational market—with support from the government—adopted as a strategy the expansion of EaD offerings to attract these students with highly affordable prices when compared to those charged in on-campus programs.
(Scudeler & Tassoni, 2023, p. 20)
The data presented thus far allow for a preliminary analysis that differentiates the institutional profile of Catholic Institutions from that of the for-profit private sector. Sustaining institutions organized as universities and college centers entails a more complex business model in both financial and academic terms, since it requires a larger professional staff, specialized infrastructure—particularly for research—and more formalized administrative processes. By contrast, for-profit HEIs, which rely on standalone colleges and distance-learning programs, operate with leaner structures focused almost exclusively on teaching, indicating more flexible managerial models and lower investment in specialized infrastructure.
It is also noteworthy that the faculty profile of CIs more closely resembles that of public HEIs, given their greater investment in hiring highly specialized professionals. This reality suggests that CIs likely bear a substantial budgetary burden related to faculty payroll. Moreover, the more limited presence of EaD programs—which naturally carry different operational costs than on-campus programs—further reinforces a distinctive element of the CI business model: on-campus programs demand greater investment in infrastructure and personnel, which undeniably increases operating expenses.
Taken together, these observations support the inference that CIs exhibit an institutional configuration more closely aligned with public HEIs, while belonging to the private nonprofit sector and, in this context, face greater challenges than educational oligopolies. The evidence suggests that CIs resist mimetic isomorphism, which is highly visible among for-profit HEIs that adopt standardized commercial recruitment strategies.
With a more traditional business model that prioritizes on-campus education supported by highly qualified faculty, and competing with for-profit HEIs that rapidly expand EaD offerings and deploy assertive marketing, CIs must now face a new era. No longer enjoying the near-monopoly they held decades ago and competing for visibility and enrollments with institutions offering lower-cost programs, CIs seek a competitive edge. Academic quality is undoubtedly one such advantage.
The model adopted by CIs also translates into stronger performance on the Ministry of Education’s evaluation instruments. Indeed, Catholic Institutions perform exceptionally well on the main quality indicators calculated by INEP based on data collection and ENADE results. The share of CIs attaining excellence-level IDD scores3 (4 and 5) exceeds that of for-profit HEIs—36% compared to 21%. A similar pattern emerges in the CPC4, in which 54% of CI programs receive excellent ratings (scores 4 and 5), whereas 27% of programs in for-profit HEIs achieve the same result. As for the IGC5—perceived as one of the most important measures of higher education quality—nearly half of Catholic HEIs reach excellence (46%), while the proportion among for-profit private HEIs is 21%.
These figures indicate that CIs also behave qualitatively like public HEIs and therefore offer students higher-quality education and a superior academic experience compared to for-profit HEIs. However, this dimension of quality must be perceived by prospective students if it is to counteract the market strategies of educational oligopolies, since excellence comes at a cost, making CI programs more expensive than those of their competitors. The value placed on academic quality is not always a decisive consideration when selecting an undergraduate program, especially for middle- and lower-income groups; consequently, studying at a CI may become a luxury accessible to only a limited number of students.
Final Considerations
In a context of intense competition and professionalized management oriented toward financial performance, Catholic higher education institutions began to confront a series of challenges, particularly from the turn of the century onward, as the restructuring of the higher education system unfolded following the legislative changes introduced by the 1996 LDB. Having previously been dominant and influential actors, Catholic Institutions (CIs) entered the 2020s as secondary players within a system now controlled by educational oligopolies that operate according to market principles.
In 2023, there were 98 CIs within a total of 2,580 HEIs. They accounted for 3.8% of existing HEIs in Brazil and enrolled nearly 338,000 students, representing 3.4% of all higher education enrollments in the country in 2023.
Despite these initial figures, CIs exhibit an institutional profile that is closely aligned with that of public HEIs: 18.4% of CIs are universities (whereas among the remaining private institutions this share is only 3.3%); CIs have 18 students per faculty member, compared to 58 in other private institutions; and 48% of CI faculty hold doctoral degrees, while the proportion in other private institutions is only 30%. These data reflect a stronger commitment among CIs to teaching quality, positioning them much closer to the institutional profile of public HEIs. Reinforcing this conclusion, CI performance on quality indicators is also superior: 36% of CIs fall within the excellence range on the IDD, a level reached by only 21% of other for-profit private institutions; a similar pattern arises in the CPC, in which 54% of CI programs are rated as excellent, whereas 27% of programs in for-profit private HEIs attain the same classification; and nearly half (46%) of CIs hold the highest IGC score, compared with 21% among for-profit private HEIs.
Although they are not highly representative in quantitative terms within the Brazilian higher education system, a closer examination of multiple indicators suggests that Catholic higher education institutions continue to stand out for the quality of their academic programs, even amid strong competition from the for-profit private sector, which offers lower-cost programs but does not achieve the same quality levels as Catholic institutions.
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1
According to https://www.puc-rio.br/sobrepuc/historia/ Access on January 2, 2025.
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2
It is worth noting that, beginning in 2022, changes to PROUNI introduced by Law 14,350 (Brasil, 2022) created significant obstacles for Catholic Institutions wishing to remain in the Program, due to changes in the calculation standard applied to institutions holding CEBAS certification. Alongside modifying scholarship quotas—raising the required proportion for beneficent HEIs and lowering it for for-profit HEIs—the law eliminated the option of 25% partial scholarships and mandated retroactive application of the new formula, creating a backlog of scholarships that placed a notable strain on the management of Catholic Institutions, particularly in the second semester of 2022 and the first semester of 2023.
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3
Indicator of Difference between Observed and Expected Performance (Indicador de Diferença entre os Desempenhos – IDD): calculated by INEP based on the performance of graduating students in ENADE and ENEM.
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4
Preliminary Course Score (Conceito preliminar de Curso – CPC): calculated every three years for each program in accordance with the evaluation cycle; it synthesizes various indicators such as ENADE results, value-added as measured by the IDD, faculty qualifications and employment status, and student perceptions of their educational conditions.
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5
General Course Index (Índice geral de cursos – IGC): calculated through the average CPC, evaluations of stricto sensu graduate programs, and the distribution of students across educational levels.
Research data availability:
All underlying research content is contained within the manuscript.
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Edited by
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Responsible editors:
Associate Editor: Chantal Medaets <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7834-3834>Editor in Chief: Helena Sampaio <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1759-4875>
