Earlier this month, the OECD released the results of this year edition of the Education at a Glance report. This annual report is one of the leading sources of comparable national statistics on the state of education worldwide. It provides data on the structure, finances and performance of education systems in OECD and partner countries. They also publish separate country notes for each country. The note on Brazil does not necessarily reveal new patterns, but there are obviously some takeaways we can single out and explore in more detail. The main goal of this text (as well as the blog) is not so much to present new information, but to help other researchers replicate findings using educational data -- and this is why I share the script used to create this post at the end of it.
In this text, I will go a little deeper into one of the key messages from the OECD report: in some aspects, Brazilian educational system is the most unequal among unequal. This is true for three indicators: tertiary attainment among young adults, teachers’ average actual salaries, and expenditure per student between levels of education. There are more differences in the first two indicators among states in Brazil than between countries in OECD, and the difference in expenditure per student between tertiary and earlier levels of education in Brazil is the highest of all OECD and partner countries. These inequalities pose important challenges for educational policy in the coming years.
There are abysmal differences in tertiary attainment among states in Brazil. The figure below presents these subnational disparities in more detail, comparing them with GDP per capita, which OECD suggests is related to college attainment rates. The interpretation of the relationship between tertiary attainment and GDP per capita is quite straightforward, as we can see. According to National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) 2015, while 32% of young adults have attained tertiary education in Distrito Federal (which has the highest GDP per capita), the share is only 7% in Maranhão (the lowest GDP per capita). Northeastern states are really in trouble in both indicators.
Education at a Glance also points out to the fact that the “difference in expenditure per student between tertiary and earlier levels of education in Brazil is the highest of all OECD and partner countries” (page 5). In 2015, Brazil spent more than three times with students in higher education than with students in primary, secondary, and post-secondary non-tertiary public institutions. This is the highest difference among OECD countries and partners. The figure below helps us to visualize the size of the gap in Brazilian government spending by educational level: it continues to have an “European” level of spending in college, but is among those who spend least on the earlier levels of education. It is true that Brazil already invests more than the average of the OECD countries as a percentage of GDP, and the improvement of educational policies and processes is able to improve quality with the current level of expenditures. However, according to OECD, the country is still in a group of countries with lower expenditures per student for which the evidence shows that more spending correlates with better results.
Finally, another interesting finding from the OECD’s report refers to the college completion according to fields of study. It is not directly related to the topic of the previous analyzes, but it is particularly relevant for discussing college completion in a complex tertiary system as the Brazilian. The figure below compares the distribution of graduates among fields of study in Brazil, the OECD average, and in three Western European countries that represent three groups with disparate patterns in this regard (learn more in this study).
The most popular fields of study for tertiary graduates in Brazil are Business, Administration and Law, and Education, both of which have a higher share of graduates in Brazil than the OECD average. On the other hand, Brazil has one of the lowest shares of graduates in STEM fields: 17% compared to an OECD average of 24% (Sweden and United Kingdom have both 27% and Portugal has 29% of graduates in STEM). A recent study by Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) Graduate Program in Sociology and Anthropology showed that STEM is a highly heterogeneous field of study in Brazilian tertiary system: advantaged students have higher probabilities of graduating in the prestigious field of Engineering than in other STEM or Technological courses. In addition to increasing the number of students with a degree in the STEM area, public policies for higher education in Brazil have the challenge of helping underprivileged students to successfully complete these courses.
The R code to replicate the above analysis is available here.