Recent legislation in Brazil addresses university admissions
with affirmative action that targets multiple characteristics that individuals
may have (in different combinations), namely income, ethnicity, and the type of institution at which they studied.
Early attempts to implement such a system produced undesirable outcomes, but
recent legislation, informed by market design, is on the path to correcting this.
Below, Inácio Bó brings us up to date:
Guest blog post by Inácio Bó
For many decades, Brazilian’s federal universities
were—and still are— the top higher education institutions in the country. They
had, however, a contradictory combination of circumstances: all of them were
public-funded and tuition-free, but their students were overwhelmingly from a
minority white higher socio-economic class. In response to that, in 2012
congress passed legislation mandating affirmative action in the access of all
such institutions.
Orhan Aygün and I were at that time classmates pursuing
our PhD in economics at Boston College. We spent days and weeks looking at the
details of the structure of the rules for implementing the law, trying to
better understand it. While working on some examples, we noticed that there
could in principle be situations that were at odds with the intended objective
of the law. Under some circumstances, black and low-income candidates would be
rejected from positions where white and high-income candidates would be
accepted, despite the former having higher entry-level exam grades than the latter.
This would be an outcome that goes in the
opposite direction from the intended objective of helping black and low-income
students attend these institutions.
The reason for this problem lies on the method used for
implement the affirmative action law in the universities. Seats in each program
in each university were split into groups of seats, including “open seats”,
“black candidates”, “low-income candidates”, and “black and low-income
candidates”. When applying for a program, a candidate would choose one of the
alternatives for which she is eligible. The top candidates among those applying
for each set of seats, ranked by their grade in a national exam, would be
accepted. This method might, however, result in different levels of competition
for different seats in the same program, resulting for example in tougher
requirements for acceptance for “black and low-income” candidates than for
“black” candidates, even if on average low-income candidates have lower grades
overall.
In a paper published in the AEJ:Micro in 2021 (Aygün, Orhan, and Inácio Bó. 2021. "College
Admission with Multidimensional Privileges: The Brazilian Affirmative Action
Case." American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 13
(3): 1-28.), we showed how this problem can be solved while still
satisfying the text and spirit of the affirmative action law in Brazil with
small changes in the way by which candidates are selected. (The idea is to
order slot-specific priorities so that candidates with protected
characteristics can compete for all of those slots for which their
characteristics qualify them.) The paper also shows “smoking gun” evidence that
these “unfair rejections” were taking place, showing that programs where the
cutoff grades for acceptance for each subset of seats were compatible with
these rejections constituted almost half of the programs offered across the
nation.
While the article gained praise in the academic economic
community, our hopes that it would reach the policymakers in Brazil were
initially dashed. Despite having the chance of personally visiting the Ministry
of Education in 2015 for two weeks, my attempts to talk with those in power
were unsuccessful, and people to whom I explained some of our findings deemed
its contents “critical of the government”.
Especially in light of the political developments that
took place in Brazil in the years that followed, I had mostly moved on from my
hopes of seeing the changes we proposed being implemented.
Things started to change, however, around May of 2022.
The staff from the office of representative Tábata Amaral, who is a prominent
young politician with a focus on education, were having talks with Ursula
Mello, now a professor at the Department of Economics at PUC-Rio in Rio de
Janeiro, about some aspects of the affirmative action law related to her work.
Given her knowledge about the AEJ:Micro
paper, Ursula suggested that I join the discussions. A meeting where this
happened even ended up in the press (https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2022/05/pesquisadores-defendem-novo-algoritmo-no-sisu-para-nao-prejudicar-cotistas.shtml).
Adriano Senkevics, her co-author in related papers who
works at the INEP—an agency connected to the Brazilian Ministry of Education in
charge of evaluating educational systems—also joined.
In these discussions, it became clear that if we wanted
our ideas to have any chance of gaining traction, we needed to write a
policy-oriented paper, focused on the current Brazilian specifics, in
Portuguese, and with policy-makers as the audience—not academics.
Adriano and I worked together in that project, now with a
much more detailed dataset. We tailored the proposal to the updated law, which
also included reservations for candidates with disabilities, and were finally
able to quantify the negative impact of the failures we identified. Our
estimates indicate that, in the selection process of 2019, at least ten
thousand students were “unfairly rejected” from their applications, with more
than 8 thousand being left unmatched to any university despite having an exam
grade high enough to be accepted for less restrictive reserved seats. These
numbers greatly exceeded our expectations, and made a clear political case for
a change. The working paper went out in January of 2023 (“Proposal
to change the rules for the occupation of quotas in the student entrance to
federal institutions of higher education,” by Inácio Bó and Adriano Souza
Senkevics).
While the theoretical arguments were already in the AEJ:Micro paper, the proposal had a
greater and faster impact in the corridors of the Brazilian capital. Articles
in the main newspapers in the country reported on the findings and the proposal
(https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/educacao/enem-e-vestibular/noticia/2023/03/quase-650-candidatos-para-uma-vaga-maiores-concorrencia-do-sisu-estao-entre-os-alunos-cotistas.ghtml
, https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/antonio-gois/coluna/2023/02/reformar-o-sisu.ghtml
, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/rodrigo-zeidan/2023/04/desenhando-mercados.shtml )
People were openly sharing the article on twitter with
members of the ministry of education
(https://twitter.com/thiamparo/status/1621189953785839617?s=20
,
https://twitter.com/mgaldino/status/1621008428763332612?s=20
). We could feel the momentum.
In the months that followed, I started having regular interactions
with members of the Ministry of Education. The text and zoom discussions
involved technical and political aspects of changes in the law, which extended
beyond the specific changes we suggested.
Different variations of the changes and some alternative
proposals were considered. I had to run simulations while flying to deliver
them before a meeting that the secretary had with the minister. I also had the
incredible experience of joining a meeting at the “Casa Civil”—a department
somewhat comparable to the prime minister in a parliamentary system—with the
presence of secretaries from multiple ministries , where I presented our
proposal and discussed some details and scenarios. Around that time, and
without our knowledge, a senator presented a bill explicitly based on our
proposal (https://www25.senado.leg.br/web/atividade/materias/-/materia/156995 ).
By the end of June, our belief that the changes would be
implemented became stronger. Since our proposal was (by design) already
compatible with the quotas law, its implementation could be done even in the
absence of new legislation, and there was clear interest on the part of those
in charge for making it happen.
A momentous event in this journey, however, took place on
August 9th.
Because of a series of political circumstances, an urge
to pass a renewed law for the affirmative action led to a bill proposed by
Representative Dandara—the first member of congress who herself benefitted from
the quotas law—to be brought to the floor for a vote.
Among other changes, it made the affirmative action
policy permanent, changed the order in which seats are filled, and included
text that should, in the following secondary legislation, include text that
describes our proposal. As if emotions were not high enough, we had urgent
calls to send the text of our proposal to members in the floor of congress
minutes before the vote took place. And this resulted in the photo below, showing
Dandara giving a speech before the vote, with a page from our paper in her
hand.
The journey is not yet over. The bill must still pass the
senate, and the legislation with the implementation details will follow. But I
learned that these changes are made of so many steps that one has to choose one
as the turning point. We believe that this is a good one.
The INEP (National Institute of Educational Studies and
Research) thinks so too: (https://www.gov.br/inep/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/linha-editorial/inep-contribui-com-atualizacao-da-lei-de-cotas)
.Aug%202024.jpg)
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