Effect of affirmative action on Brazilian public higher education

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the effect of the affirmative action policy on the performance of students in the Brazilian public higher education network in the period 2011-2016. For this purpose, the pseudo-panel methodology with fixed effects estimator was used. In general, the results point to the existence of a negative relationship between the referred policy and the students' grades; however, it was observed that its effect is distinguished among the courses evaluated by the National Student Performance Examination (Enade). In addition, it was found that individual ex ante and ex post efforts in the selection process are important in determining this relationship.