Quota Law completes 10 years: understand how it works and its importance

A Quota Law, which guarantees that at least half of the vacancies in undergraduate courses at federal universities are reserved for students who attended high school in public, low-income, black, brown and indigenous education institutions (PPI) and people with disabilities (PwD), completes 10 years at the end of August. This law was approved by Congress and sanctioned in 2012, during the Dilma Rousseff government.

Read more: Racial Quotas: What Brazilians Think

The law aims to democratize access to higher education, making entering universities a process fairer, so that students can compete with a grade that is more consistent with the economic and social reality of the country.

Within this percentage of 50%, half of the vacancies are reserved for students from families with a monthly income equal to or less than 1.5 minimum wages per capita (per/for each family member).

In each income range, among the quota candidates, vacancies are separated for self-declared blacks, browns and indigenous and people with disabilities, proportionally to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) census in the state of university. See the illustration that exemplifies how the offer of vacancies of a course works according to the Law of Quotas:

The importance of this Law was recently commented on in a report by Fantástico with the charismatic ex-BBB 21 Gil do Vigor, shareholder at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) who graduated from the Undergraduate, Masters and Doctorate courses in Economy. Gil recently earned his PhD in Economics at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis).

“I didn't feel part of that, I didn't think I could live with those people, but, at the same time, I didn't allow that feeling to take over me”, reported the economist.

Lover of movies and series and everything that involves cinema. An active curious on the networks, always connected to information about the web.