The number of contracts signed by the Student Financing Fund registered strong growth between 2011 and 2014. However, the number of defaults also increased. A survey carried out via the Access to Information Law, the index more than doubled between 2014 and 2018. Nearly half of alumni are three months behind in installments.
The data were obtained by the G1 news portal. The results show that, between December 2014 and March this year, the debtor rate rose from 18% to 41%. The number of students with 90 days of late installments reaches 249,433 contractors. The amount is equivalent to 41% of the 612,225 financed who went through the financing and grace periods.
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Even with the rate much higher than the 10% of defaulters expected, the rules of the Special Program for Regularization of Fies have not yet been defined. The project was included in the Provisional Measure approved in November 2017. Due to the lack of regulation, the National Education Development Fund (FNDE) points out that there is no contract linked to the Program.
Data on default on contracts only started to be released after 2015. According to the FNDE, the statistics had not yet been released due to the low number of contracts in the amortization phase. This is the period in which debt would be extinguished by periodic payments.
More than 600,000 students are in the phase of paying the installments, however, fewer and fewer manage to pay them within the deadlines. In March, 128,689 contracts were overdue from one to 89 days. If added to defaulters, the number reaches 378,122, that is, of the total financing, 234,103 were paid on time.
After a high number of contracts signed in response to demand, FIES began to regulate the granting of the benefit, in order to limit the budget that reached R$ 13.7 billion in 2014. In 2015, the Ministry of Education announced some measures, such as raising interest rates, reducing the family income ceiling and giving privileges to certain undergraduate courses.
The actions aimed to prioritize poorer students, in addition to the graduations most needed by society, in addition to having better evaluations. Contracts also began to be established through a selection process that requires a minimum score in the Enem. In 2017, the measures managed to reduce the number of contracts to the lowest rate in six years.
However, they were not enough to stop defaults, so the government announced the reformulation of the program, called New FIES. Among the items would be price controls practiced by universities and changes in interest rates.
What is noticeable, however, in view of the increase in defaults, is that students are still struggling to pay their installments. Furthermore, all the measures to control the debt ratio have yet to get off the ground.
