How Brazil develops its technical skills: Strengths and weaknesses

Claudio de Moura Castro

In a period of less than one century, Brazil has gone from a traditional producer of commodities to a country displaying a broad variety of activities, including a diversified manufacturing sector and a highly competitive agro-business.

Thanks to favourable natural endowments and serious R&D, it ranks in the top three in the export of several commodities. It also ranks among the top five automobile manufacturers and has the third largest commercial airplanes factory. These days, manufacturing is losing ground to agro-business, but it is premature to talk about deindustrialization.

Considering the above examples, something must have been done right, in order to prepare the requisite labour for its Industrial Revolution and then,its Green Revolution.Nevertheless, there are also many problems and perplexities in the education and training systems. Or better said, in the several and intricate systems and “non-systems”.

This paper is a review of how this complex system of education and training was developed and how it stands now. It examines the main players in skills training, the technical education system, under the Ministry of Education (henceforth MEC) and a huge and invisible training and education “non-system”

The Training and Education split

Historically, education develops the Mind - and has little to do with preparing the Hands. To structure and manage the sprawling network of schools, Ministries of Education (or equivalent bureaucracies with different names) were established, in just about all countries. This world has its bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, its values and its political identity.

Training originates fromthe “learn by doing” tradition, progressively formalized in the Apprenticeship traditions. In the beginning, it was just training the Hands. Therefore, whatever oversight there was, it had little to do with the educational authorities. Ministries of Labour filled the void and, in many cases, created and managed the appropriate institutions.

Hence, education management and supervision have been a role for the Ministry of Education and skills preparation an affair of theMinistry of Labour. What may look only as a bureaucratic convenience turns out to be a major cultural and sociological cleavage.Stubbornly, these two worlds no not mix well or do not mix at all.

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The education establishment disdains manual activities, thinks little of its preparation and tends to have prejudice or even ideological resistance to the world of work and the productive sectors. In practice, whenever it tries to offer work preparation, the practical end suffers. By contrast, the skills world has lower status, but little patience towards the lofty words and lack of practicality of educators.

The frontier between these two worlds has always been conflictive, as illustrated by decades-long bickering between UNESCO and ILO. However, much preparation for the world of work takes place under the banner of education authorities. Systematically, attempts to obtain a seamless blending of the two worlds have failed miserably - at least, as far as my knowledge goes. Training that takes place inside Education bureaucracies tends to have innate weaknesses and be treated as the poor cousin.

Brazil exhibits this traditional split, but with some particular features of its own. All vocational or skills training falls under the supervision of the Ministry of Labour, like almost everywhere. However, the situation is more complex than that. There is more theory than practice in this statement.

As explained later, the bulk of the training system is private, under the ownership and responsibility of employers’ associations – even though the funding is public. This is the well-known “System S” – because all its many bodies have names starting with the word Serviços (services). However, while it is legally under the oversight of the Ministry of Labour, in practice, this Ministry has hardly any power over it. Consider that the joint budget of these institutions is several times larger than that of the Ministry and the quality, stability and strength of the staff much higher.

What matters here is the fact that System S is not under the legal supervision of MEC and, as stated above, the Ministry of Labour, de facto, has hardly any power over it. System S has its own logic and whatever certificates are produced have nothing to do with education or even with official diplomas. For all practical purposes, it is a highly organized but unregulated system. It is a world of its own, mostly for good.

However, the situation is a bit more complicated with technical education. Like in most countries, as oneclimbs higher in the hierarchy of skills, one unavoidably ends up in the technical education diplomas, which combine academic degrees with work preparation. These are varieties of the well-known technical and short post-secondary programs.And wherever academic degrees are involved, education authorities have thelegal oversight.

This means that when the System S offers courses that are regulated by MEC, it must conform to its legislation and procedures. Considering the constant upgrading of skills, the growth of this formula is an unavoidable tendency in Brazil- and worldwide. However, MEC does not have any more power over System S than it does over the proprietary private sector in general.

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To sum up, the Hand and the Mind are each under sociological and ideological traditions that are quite different and cannot be ignored. In the Brazilian situation, this split is clear and reflected in the division of labour between MEC and System S. In the overlapping areas, there is an acceptable Pax Romana.

The “System S”, createdto prepare skilled workers

World War II caught Brazil well into the process to develop its own manufacturing system. The war effort in the northern Hemisphere created a severe scarcity of just about all types of industrial products. This brought a natural protection to shelter the local infant industry, accelerating growth.

The history of SENAI

Going in tandem with the backward education of the country, there were hardly any programs to train skilled workers. As scarcity of skilled labour started to hit industrial development, a major controversy took place: Who is going to be in charge of vocational training and what model to adopt?

Educators wanted to bring training under the umbrella of the Ministry of Education. Employers wanted to be in charge of this task. After protracted battles, a solution was found, totally different from what happens anywhere else in the world – even today.

The government decided that employers’ associations would do the training and they would follow their own schemes,independent from education authorities. In so many words, training would be done by the private sector. However, the funding would be public, being provided by a 1% levy on the payroll. If not the first, this was one of the earlier examples of this form of financing for training.

The first institution of this dynasty was SENAI (in São Paulo, where manufacturing was farther ahead in the country),given the task of training industrial workers. It tapped on the experience of railroad training traditions, the most advanced and structured at the time. The first manager was a Swiss engineer, from the watchmaking canton of that country. Therefore, a strong mechanical tradition from Switzerland and Germany was brought in, early in the development of SENAI.

Subsequently, each of the Brazilian states (today, reaching 27) developed its own SENAI, following the same pattern but with considerable independence from one another. A central SENAI was created, with the task of coordinating the state branches, but with only a moderate power to impose common policies. All in all, it is a very decentralized system.

The so-called “Methodical Series”, then popular in Europe, was adopted at the workshops of all trades taught. This consists in organizing the courses as a series of increasingly complex practical projects. Each project incorporates learning in

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manual skills, blueprint,drafting, technology and all else that is required –including reading, writing and Mathematics. In so many words, SENAI developed in the forties a robust version of what is called today Problem-Based Learning (PBL). A very detailed package for each course was developed, allowing new schools to reproduce the method without unduly serious difficulties. This system was so successful that it was translated into Spanish and adopted by just about all Latin American countries.

The provision of a budget without the uncertainties of government moods - towards assigning funds to ministries - allowed for a long run planning horizon and the development of a high calibre staff, with plenty esprit de corps. This has been an invaluable asset, as every so often, SENAI gets hit by left-wing ideologies, protesting against its private ownership. There have also been attempts of MEC to kidnap its substantial budgets. Since its creation, in 1942, it has resisted all these assaults, counting also with substantial help from business associations.

Expansion of System S

The instant success of SENAI prompted the government to create equivalent bodies for other sectors of the economy. In the late forties, SENAC was created, for the commercial sectors. Subsequently, a rural equivalent was also created (SENAR) and one for small firms (SEBRAE). The transportation system split from SENAI, creating SENAT. SENAR and SEBRAE were created as public bureaucracies but itsutter inefficacity lead the government to change its mind and privatize them, like the others.

From the beginning, SENAI focused on the training of skilled labour, in the classical occupations, like woodworkers, machinists, electricians and so on. The trade trainingwas always combined with some provision of basic skills (language, math etc.).

Apprenticeship. When created, SENAI put much emphasis on apprenticeship schemes. After all, vocational training is an offshoot from spontaneous apprenticeship. But unfortunately, in the attempt to protect apprentices from abuse, the growing amount of regulation ended up making it a bad proposition for employers. These days, apprenticeship is only a residual mode of preparing labour these days.

But this is not the only problem with apprenticeship. Under fast industrialization, these schemes do not permit a fast growth in supply. It is bound by the relatively small number of people with the profile to become masters. Therefore, classroom cum workshop models thrived early on.

Gender issues. The doctorate is the only level of academic education in Brazil in which women do not predominate. Even there, the difference is narrowing very fast. But in vocational training, there is still a substantial difference in the gender balance. Skilled manual occupations remain predominantly (but not entirely) male, while teaching, nursing, secretarial and a few other occupations are

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typically feminine. Nonetheless, we should remember that the women are in occupations that grow, while blue-collar occupations are mostly stagnant or shrinking.

Certification. The existence of an all-powerful SENAI has had a negative impact in all the succeeding efforts to create a certification or Qualification Framework, so popular these days. The quality of the SENAI courses have always been recognized – for instance, some firms looking for new employees may state in the adds that only SENAI graduates will be considered. Therefore, those firms that want to know whom they are hiring will tend to consider SENAI certificates as sufficient evidence of quality.

For decades, the Ministry of Labour has been talking about the creation of a certification system. For a number of reasons, including the prestige of the SENAI certificates, this idea never materialized. That being the case, the idea of recognizing prior learning is even more remote. Official rhetoric, as well as UNESCO and ILO still repeat this mantra. It is in the law, but nothing has happened and it is unlikely that it will happen in a foreseeable future.

On the other hand, there is a new certification wave, under the banner of the ISO norms – and its counterpart in Brazil. For instance, pipeline welding is a trade certified by ISO, through its accredited organizations. Recently, adventure tourism also adopted this system of ISO certification. Needless to say, the Ministry of Labour and MEC have stayed outside all these parallel efforts.

Numbers and Resources.The volume of resources mobilized by the System S is quite significant. In the year xxx US$, the total budget was xxx US$, broken down as xxx US$ for SENAI, xxxUS$ for SENAC, XXX US$ for SEBRAE, xxxUS$ for SENAR and xxx US$ for SENAT.

With these resources, the three systems trained xxx participants, in programs of widely different durations. Given this heterogeneity in duration, it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons with education statistic.

It is interesting to notice that SENAI and SENAC, in addition to what they do with their regular budgets, sell services to industry and accept individual students who pay for some of the courses. In the case of SENAI, in addition to the 1% budget, it generated xxx million in selling courses and other services to industry. In the case of SENAC, XX% of their budget comes in addition to the 1% revenue.

Strengths and weaknesses of the System S

Most observers in the international scene consider SENAI a model institution. For a country of very modest achievements in education, to have an institution that easily reaches international levels is a source of national pride. In my own observation, after visiting over a hundred institutions, almost everywhere in the world, this perception is confirmed.

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SENAI has ranked consistently among the top three institutions in the World Skills Competition. Granted, performing above Switzerland and Germany does not mean that SENAI is better, since it devotes enormous time and money to prepare participants. These two European countries – as many others - do not need to prove anything in this area, therefore, have a more casual attitude towards this competition. Be that as it may, reaching the top is not only a matter of training the chosen participants. One needs to have a long and excellent tradition of skills development, with superb instructors, who are able to prepare their students to world-class performance. This is what is implied by these results.

Overall, skilled workers prepared by SENAI are as good or better than any in the developing world and some can rank among the best anywhere. This is the result of more than half a century of investment in quality training. Pride in craftsmanship, as well as proper management of the institution are partly responsible for that. And, perhaps surprisingly, the institution is resisting the wear and tear of time.

Regional disparities. Brazil is a highly heterogeneous country. Therefore, one should not expect the same quality of São Paulo and the Southern states to be reproduced in the weakly industrialized states of the North and Northeast. And indeed, they are not. However, the differences in quality are not as pronounced as those observed in academic education. System S is able to prevent quality of instruction from falling precipitously in these poorer regions. In fact, I never saw a derelict school or levels of craftsmanship that are inadequate. To wit, thestate-widetrials that select participants for the World Skills Competition show a distribution of winners that is surprisingly diverse in geography.

Training is separate from education. A very attractive feature of the system is the fact that it is fully disconnected from formal education. Candidates to System S courses have attendedacademic schools and stay there for as long as they want or can. After they leave, they may decide to enrol in a System S course of study. Given the play of supply and demand, more desirable and sophisticated occupations attract students who stayed longer in academic schools. By the same token, as the average schooling levels in the country increase, the students postulating a vacancy tend to be better educated now than they were before.

System S is heterogeneous. Despite its overall success, a number of qualifications are in order. SENAC, the sister institution for commerce does have world-class programs, but overall, the level reached is not as high. SEBRAE is far more creative and mercurial than SENAI, and this is its predicament, for good and for evil.

Strengths and weaknesses come from the same source. Where are the main shortcomings of the System S? The answer is that it lies in the same logic that makes it effective: being owned and managed by employers. Serious and effective employers’ associations, predictably, ensure a high quality training system. Contrariwise, associations from more backward states can be somewhat politicized, unstable and plagued with nepotism and other evils of public and

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semi-public bureaucracies. SENAI is powerless to resist the encroachment of such bad associations. In other words, SENAI is as good as the employers of the corresponding state.

One persistent feature of SENAI is administrative inertia. It does well, whatever it tries to do. But changing directions is quite difficult. It is an inherently stable institution, for good and for evil.

Be that as it may, overall, the bad apples are not that many and the vast majority of entities in System S display, at least, a reasonable performance. The acid test, of course, is the employability of the graduates. While the data are not totally inclusive, enough tracer studies allow us to conclude that a very high proportion of graduates get jobs commensurate with their training. Typically, from 60% to 90% do so.

Employers want to match supply and demand. SENAI is an employer’s organization. Its logic is clear. Employers have all the reasons in the world to make sure that it prepares the labour profile they need. Therefore, if they are unhappy with the graduates produced, they can instantly fire the headmaster of the school or even the General Director in the State. This does not happen often, but the fact that it can happen works as a powerful deterrent against complacency or inefficiency. Compared to all other system of training, anywhere in the world, this is one of the most robustsolutions to prevent the usual dysfunctionalities of training, namely, supply going in the wrong direction.

How to deal with low-status occupations?One problem that affects SENAI these days – and has always been a problem - is the low status of some occupations, particularly in less industrialized states. It is hard to attract, retain and direct to the corresponding jobs in occupationslike furniture making or boiler making.The situation is even worse in trades related to civil construction. SENAI has displayed little imagination and boldness to counteract this old and well-known problem.

Industrial R&D.One high point of SENAI, not present in its sisters’ institutions, is the tradition of doing industrial R&D. An evaluation, about a decade ago, showed a very significant number of projects being undertaken. And indeed, the results are quite satisfactory. However, this evaluation also suggested that it does not do as much R&D as it could.

Pre-service training or enrolling adult workers?At the beginning, SENAI was conceived as an institution to train young workers. Progressively, it started offering courses for working adults who needed upgrading their skills. In times of slumbering growth, the share of employed participants increased, due to the difficulty of placing youth in jobs. As a result of misdirected labour laws for minors, apprenticeships and other instruction to this group has been progressively shrinking.

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Therefore, SENAI is an institution that trains workers of any age. This is in contrast to what happens in Europe, where institutions to train the youth are different from others dedicated to upgrade workers or train the unemployed.

Acute labour scarcities in present times.With the acceleration of growth, in the last decade, the demand for skilled labour of all varieties has increased. The ability of System S to respond quickly to this sudden scarcity is limited by its budget. Notice that countries such as Colombia and Costa Rica levy 2% of the payroll, instead of one, as is the case with SENAI.

SENAC. SENAC has the same formal structure of SENAI. However, employers in this loosely organized service sector are not very present or active vis a vis SENAC, in order to make their needs explicit. Therefore, SENAC took a different direction. Students pay for most of its courses, at least in part. Therefore, it follows the logic of the market. It offers courses in whatever prospective students are willing to pay. So, for all practical purposes, is a market-driven organization. Therefore, it is self-regulating.

SENAI could also be considered as self-regulating, if we include the employers in the equation. Decisions to offer this or that course, as a result of permanent contacts with firms, instead of going through the market, reflect a direct connection between supply (SENAI) and demand (firms).

The informal sector. With the exception of SEBRAE (small enterprises), System S caters to the formal system and progressively climbs up to the most sophisticated occupations. In fact, it has an ingrained and cultural preference for moving uphill. In addition, like in many Latin American countries, employers are not happy to have their levy contribution used to fund workers of the informal sector - that does not pay taxes.

Considering that the informal sector employs close to half of the labour force, responding to their needs is one of the most contentious issues with System S. Many attempts have taken place with many different schemes. But not thatmuch has happened. However, whenever additional government funds are offered, it responds quickly and with quality programs, even though targeting may be inadequate, due to the rules of most public programs of this nature.

The huge and invisible “non-system”

According to the government statistics, the total number of people trained by System S and other less important programs is somewhat limited. As mentioned, it reaches around xxx millions from the System S and not much else is tallied.

However, these statistics vastly underestimate the amount of training that takes place and is not recorded, because it does not exist legally. The same with the funds mobilized to generate much of this training.

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To fill the gap in knowledge, this author and an associate (Elenice Leite) undertook a survey of other training alternatives offered in the country. We called what we found the “invisible training system”, since it is not captured by statistics and it is not the object of any public policies. In fact, it is totally ignored by public bureaucracies.

We tried to tally what firms do to prepare their workers, what vendors offer as training to those who purchase equipment and what consulting firms offer to their clients. The numbers are not entirely adequate, but give orders of magnitude. Of course, underestimations are unavoidable.

Preparation for tests giving access to public jobs or universities, English training programs, computer instruction and many other possibilities were also included.

There are many proprietary programs offering training (English, for instance). Firms train their workers. NGOs have philanthropic initiatives along these lines. Finally, municipalities and other “generic” government bodies sponsor much training.

To make a long story short, we found that this invisible training non-system enrolled around forty million people per year (about ten years ago). This was about the same as the total enrolment in academic schools in the same period. In other words, the invisible system is as big as the visible one.

Our rough estimatesindicate costs between 4% and 5% of the GDP. This is an extraordinary number. If official figures show around 5% of expenditures in education, adding the invisible sector means that around 10% of GNP goes to education and training, half of it unaccounted for.

Neither the Ministry of Labour nor MEC take notice of this monstrous effort. This means that there are no policies to guide them. It is totally market driven. Supply and demand is the name of the game. Nor are there certification, evaluation or oversight.

Is this good or bad? Considering how much public bureaucracies pester school operators and how ineffective are their efforts to control abuse, perhaps, it is altogether a happy circumstance that nobody pays attention to this sector. Interestingly, the press does not reveal scandals, abuse or other newsworthy events – at the same time that much space goes to denounce scandals in the regulated sectors of education.

Technical education and the Ministry of Education

We now turn to the academic side of training. Brazil has two modalities of technical education, not unlike other countries. It has the secondary technical schools and the “tecnólogos” that are two-year post secondary institutions.

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Both modalities are under the oversight of MEC, by contrast to vocational training that is done mostly by System S and is the object of very little regulation. Like in most Ministries of Education, there are some common denominators. Regulations abound and the complexity or the rules and regulations baffle all who approach this world.

As spelled out below, there is a drift towards diplomas and academic life. Preparing modest students in not the ideal model for the staff of these public technical schools. In addition, there is a discreet or open anti-private sector bias. But considering the inability of the government to expand its own schools, living with the private sector is inevitable.

Technical schools are recurrent solutions everywhere in the world. The idea is simple: combine an academic degree with some professional training – or, at least – an introduction to the world of work. However, this turnsout to be a very unstable formula. Too much is expected of these schools. An academic degree that prepares for higher education is added to the nuts and bolts of preparing for an occupation. On top of that, schools are expected to offer the skills to leave school and go to the market – or just to be a good citizen.

This menu gives indigestion. It is too heavy. Being a solution widely adopted, it is no surprise that it tends to present problems everywhere. Being unstable, it can warp in different directions. Too much emphasis on the vocational side and they attract only underprepared students from low social extraction. It may then become a dumping ground for weak students. Too much emphasis on academics and they attract high performance students, trying to get a tuition-free education of high quality. Professional preparation becomes meaningless.

The numbers. For a long time, the Brazilian government chose to create a high quality and expensive network of technical schools. About one hundred of them were in existence until a few years ago. Altogether, these schools enrolled xxx students. All in all, this is a minute number, compared to cohorts at the corresponding age. At each age, cohorts, rangefrom 2 to 3 million youth – as demography changes. Several new units are now under construction but the increase in enrolment is not expected to be dramatic, compared to the size of the corresponding cohorts.

Technical schools and the Catch-22. These schools, for several decades, were plagued with a “Catch 22” situation. The better they became, the larger the share of graduates that went into the most competitive universities in the country, instead of entering the corresponding labour market. Considering how expensive these schools are, this is a clear waste of resources. In other words, the better they became, the less they contributed to solve the problem of technical skills.

In the mid 90s, the Ministry of Education split these courses into two tracks. One was the plain academic program. The other was the professional track, preparing technicians. Candidates could take just the academic track, if all they wanted was a good education, preparing for higher education tests. Only those truly interested in getting a profession would want to enrol in the technical track. That

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allowed more modest students to find places in the technical track that was crowded before by more affluent students who wanted only to get a good academic education. This split prevailed until the new left-leaning government was inaugurated in 2002. The federal schools again integrated the two tracks, for a number of ideological and prestige reasons.

An interesting feature of this split is the possibility it opens for students to take the technical track after graduating from secondary, instead of doing both at the same time. This simplifies matters, as it allows potential candidates to postpone their technical training for as many years as they want. It also lightens their workload, a major concern for working students. About half of the students opt for this alternative. In practice, this increases the average age of technical education students.

Parallel to the federal network of schools, System S also created technical schools. They are equally expensive but tend to be more specialized and closer to the firms in the corresponding sectors. Their number is also quite limited, xx units, and enrollingxxx students. From the mid 90s, they have adopted the separate tracks for technical and academic and remained with this scheme, in contrast to the reversal in federal schools.

From the point of view of policies and legal oversight, the System S technical schools are treated by MEC like any other private schools. Surely, they must follow the law and they must apply to obtain initial accreditation. But other than that, education authorities do not have any direct power over them.

SENAI technical schools are one hundred per cent under the stewardship of the employer’s associations – even though, in theory, the Ministry of Labour would have something to say about them. Therefore, like the regular vocational training, previously described, these schools are self-regulating or better said, regulated by the employers who hire the graduates.

The large, highly industrialized and affluent state of São Paulo has its own network of technical schools. These days, xxx of them are in operation. They cost less and are less sophisticated than either SENAI or the federal schools. However, tracer studies show a very high employability of its graduates.

A lot less conspicuous is the growth in the private sector – and often for-profit – network of private schools. Actually, it has been displaying two-digit growth in the last several years. Its total enrolment, at xxx, is already larger that that of all the other public and semi-public modalities.

The quality of private sector schools, while not formally measured, seems to be quite heterogeneous. By and large, schools cannot reach the quality levels of the SENAI and Federal schools, if nothing else, because they enrol modest students who must pay full cost. Also, the range of courses is narrower, focussing mostly on computer, nursing aids, secretarial, business and other such generic courses.

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All these schools put together enrol xxx students. A very modest number, compared to the around nine million students in academic tracks. In other words, it is a very low enrolment, even though the situation is changing fast, due to the precipitous growth in the proprietary network.

“Tecnologos”

Brazil being a latecomer in all modes of education, it is no surprise that two-year post-secondary programs were also lagging, compared to other countries of similar development. When getting a secondary diploma was a privilege, the reasons for taking a short course, instead of a full university programs were not convincing. In fact, returns to investment in higher education remain astonishingly high.

Therefore, schools offering such degrees were slow to appear. However, with the abrupt expansion in higher education, the beginning of market saturationfor “generic” diplomas is setting in, giving more space for highly-focussed short programs. Together with technical schools, these are the only sectors of education growing at two digits. They presently correspond to 12% of higher education enrolment, still a very low number, to be sure.

The federal schools that offer technical education also operate“tecnólogos”. The same with System S where most schools offering technical education also offer a two-year program.

It must be considered that the private sector “tecnólogos” are expanding very fast, in a pattern similar to the technical schools. In most cases, new courses are being openedby colleges already offering four-year bachelor programs. Aggressive operators have seen a chance to grow faster in this greenfield.

To a very significant extent, this growth is a spin off from the overheated private higher education sector - which already dominates 75% of enrolment in four-year programs. This is a vibrant and highly energized sector, invaded in the last decade by businessmen, bankers and foreign capital.

In the world of proprietary schools, the “técnico” and “tecnólogo” partnerships in the same school are a lot less common than colleges adding a “tecnólogo” to their offerings.

Strengths and weaknesses

Considering the private-public dichotomy, the situation with technical schools and “tecnólogos” is quite similar.

Public technical schools are expensive but not market driven.Public schools are expensive, very expensive indeed for the public coffers. Worse, the Constitution does not permit student’s payment of tuition in public education.

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Most technical schools and “tecnólogos” have splendid campuses and first class equipment. The same goes to the academic credentials of the faculty. Overall, these are very serious and worthy institutions.

However, like in public universities, there are problems in governance. Principals are not very accountable, either to society at large or to the MEC.

But perhaps the most serious problem results from the combination of “academic drift” and certain aloofness towards the world of work. Increasingly, the virus of academicism infects these schools. There is a strong pressure to hire masters and doctors as faculty, while practical experience counts little in evaluations. In the past two years, new legislation requires that principals of technical and “tecnólogo” schools have Ph.Ds., a totally absurd rule, since that almost ensures that the incumbent has no practical experience and, therefore, does not know about the occupations being taught. In fact, one can say that this is a most acute case of what, many years ago, Ronald Dore called “academic drift”.

These schools want to become universities, with all the prestige that goes with it. They dream of becoming tropical MITs.

The other problem with them is a chronic reluctance to get very close to the enterprises. Capitalism is still a dirty word, at least among some of the more politically engaged faculty.

Repeating, this is not to say that these schools are not socially useful. In fact, they are. Graduates are well prepared to use their minds and well versed in all kinds of technological culture. But they are not hands-on institutions.

On the positive side, the best of them do a lot of research. In some cases, contract research with enterprises. At least the one I visited had a hotline for enterprises to call and present their problems. If there is agreement in these initial conversations, this may lead to a contract to retrofit a machine, to develop new equipment or to troubleshoot problems in firms.

Private sector “tecnólogos”. Having to pay all expenditures out of what students contribute with tuition, private schools cannot match the exploits of the Federal or the SENAI schools. Nevertheless, they are growing and providing decent services to the students. Clearly, they operate in less expensive areas, for instance, in business, rather than in automation.

They tend to employ teachers with more practical experience. However, in evaluations by MEC, points are gained by employing those with more diplomas, even though they may completely lack experience.

One major difficulty faced by the private sector is the same for “tecnólogos” and four-year colleges, namely, obtaining the initial authorization to open the institution or to offer courses. There has been a long tradition of redtape and Byzantine formal requirements to obtain the charter that allows the operation to start. This has been a battle for a long time. Eventually, permission is granted,

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but the effort is considerable and it is not clear that following these formal rituals helps much in terms of ensuring quality.

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