University of São Paulo: Revision of the Quota Law expands inclusion actions in universities

The amendments to the Quota Law approved by the Chamber of Deputies were evaluated positively by people who have been closely following the issue of affirmative action. Last week, federal deputies approved bill 5.384/2020, which makes adjustments to Law 12.711/2012 – a law that made it mandatory to reserve places for public school students and self-declared blacks, browns and indigenous people in federal universities. The Minister of Racial Equality, Anielle Franco, herself a beneficiary of the quota system when she was a student at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Uerj), attended the plenary session of the Chamber in person.

Originally proposed by federal deputy Maria do Rosário (PT-RS) and other authors, bill 5.384/2020 was approved with the text of the substitute by the rapporteur, deputy Dandara (PT-MG). According to the approved proposal, the affirmative action program of the federal institutions of higher and technical education will have adjustments in the rules of the entrance exam, will prioritize quota holders in granting scholarships and will include quilombola students as beneficiaries of quotas. To become law, the bill still needs to go through discussion in the Senate, before proceeding to presidential sanction.

To better understand what advances the text approved by the Chamber brings, Jornal da USP spoke with Professor Ana Lanna, USP’s dean of Inclusion and Belonging; with Amanda Medina, student at the Faculty of Law (FD) at USP and member of the Coalition of Black Collectives at USP; and with Bárbara Barboza, Master in Political Science from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) at USP and member of Coletiva Gira.

It is worth remembering that the Federal Quotas Law does not apply to USP, which follows its own resolution. However, the main adjustments approved by deputies are similar to measures that began to be implemented at USP in 2023. This shows that Brazilian public universities have been cohesively moving towards inclusion and combating inequalities.

“I thought the process was very important. It was significant to reaffirm the importance of quotas at a time when we know that they really make a change in the profile of our students, but do not affect the quality of their performance. We already have a lot of study, a lot of knowledge showing that these students very quickly recompose the initial difference in the cut-off grade when it exists. I thought it was a very important gain for us to build a more inclusive and more democratic society”, says the pro-rector Ana Lanna.

Quotas become a floor, not an inclusion ceiling
Ana Lanna and Amanda Medina highlight, as the main advance in bill 5,384/2020, the change in the application of quotas, which will only occur after all vacancies of wide competition are filled, regardless of whether the approved candidates have opted for the affirmative policy or not. With this, the quotas start to function as an inclusion floor.

“An important change in the law is the issue of entrance exams. If the candidate for quotas has enough grades to enter either through open competition or public school, he does not occupy the [ethnic-racial] quota vacancy. This was a change that [at USP] was a demand from the student movement and was implemented in the entrance exam now, in 2023, and with very significant results”, comments Ana Lanna.

According to the professor, the change in the application of quotas in the USP entrance exam resulted in the entry of hundreds more indigenous students, compared to previous years.

“We understood that quotas could not be a ceiling, but (that) they had to be a representative floor. Before, people who wanted to run for quotas were restricted to those quotas. But now, if they have enough score, they go to broad (competition). This makes PPI (black, brown and indigenous) or EP (public school) people who have lower grades, who would not be able to compete widely, remain in these policies, even. So, there will be a greater number of people from public school, black, this change does that”, says Amanda Medina. “For us, it was very important to see this change in the feds”, completes the student.

For Bárbara Barboza, the panorama of Brazilian universities, after a decade of the Quota Law, is a much more diverse and much darker scenario. “This has given more power to the knowledge that Brazil develops. It means that black students make a lot of difference when they access the university and make a lot more difference when they manage to stay and see the university as a repertoire within their life project”, says the political scientist, who was a beneficiary of the quotas of her graduate program in the master’s degree.

Income, survival and student permanence
Another important adjustment concerns the income of candidates for the entrance exam. Law 12,711/2012 provides that half of the reserved places must be allocated to students with a per capita family income equal to or less than 1.5 times the minimum wage. The approved proposal now benefits students with a per capita family income of up to one minimum wage, reinforcing the focus on serving the poorest population.

“Due to the precariousness of life, of survival, many students ended up abandoning the idea of ​​graduating or staying at the university, both in postgraduate and undergraduate courses as well. These students needed to work. We are talking about work, including precarious, outsourced work, especially women in the university, people with children. These people were the ones who most dropped out of university in recent years”, reports Bárbara. “So, reducing the per capita income from one and a half wages to one minimum wage means that more students can access the university, in accordance, now, with this new scenario of impoverishment of the Brazilian population”, she evaluates.

In this sense, the priority of quota holders in granting scholarships is seen as a relevant advance. “The priority for quota holders to be scholarship holders is a struggle of black movements and student movements since quotas exist. Because, for quota holders to be successful, it is important that they have conditions to remain in the university, and conditions mean integrated retention policies. One of them is the bag. But also housing allowance, the tray, food allowance, the daycare issue”, says the political scientist.

Other points highlighted by the sources interviewed by Jornal da USP were the inclusion of vacancies reserved for quilombolas, who find it more difficult to access the university due to PPI quotas, and the forecast that postgraduate programs will also implement affirmative actions in courses of master’s and doctorate. If approved by the Senate, the new law should be reviewed in ten years. In the meantime, the Ministry of Education (MEC) will be responsible for publishing annual monitoring reports. Other ministries should also follow the program.

In the opinion of the Dean of Inclusion and Belonging at USP, ten years is a reasonable period for a new review, as it makes it possible to observe data from two cycles of undergraduate training. “The undergraduate courses last around five years. So, you can really do an analysis, understand not only income, but also performance and employability”, says Professor Ana.

Heteroidentification banking was left out of the review
“When the Coalition of Black Collectives emerged, which was in April 2021, it emerged precisely claiming that it had the hetero-identification bank and that it had the change in the rules of vacancy reservations”, says Amanda, about the articulation of USP students. The hetero-identification booths aim to prevent fraud in ethnic-racial quotas.

Implemented at USP from 2023, they have existed in other universities for longer – the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB), for example, follows a procedure for hetero-identification or measurement of people with disabilities described in a resolution in 2018 There is a demand from the black movement and the student movement for the establishment of guidelines based on racial literacy, to support the decisions of the hetero-identification boards.

However, to ensure the approval of bill 5.384/2020, the rapporteur Dandara left this point out of the final text. Dandara’s articulation was successful, so much so that the project was approved in a symbolic vote, with some isolated votes by opposition deputies. Bárbara believes that, thanks to Dandara’s articulation, the passage of the bill in the Senate will hardly bring surprises. Some challenges, however, will have to be faced in the next revision of the affirmative action program.

“It is excellent that Brazil is now maturing the debate on racial identity, on race relations. Brazil has an increasingly black face, increasingly indigenous. However, this brings some challenges in all scenarios where we talk about race. In the political scenario, in the university scenario”, comments the political scientist. “The hetero-identification commission is still a challenge”, she concludes.