Abstract
This chapter compares the federal higher education student financing systems of three countries: Brazil, the United States, and Australia. It poses the question whether recent reforms to the Brazilian system have moved it toward the system used by the United States or Australia and considers what Brazilian policymakers can learn from these systems. This is a relevant debate for at least three reasons. First, the Australian and the U.S. systems represent very different and influential approaches in higher education student financing. Second, the Brazilian system presents both similarities and differences to the other two, raising important questions about the efficiency and sustainability of federal student aid systems. Third, Brazil is a large developing country with rising, but still low, participation rates in higher education, so the success or failure of this country’s ongoing institutional changes may influence future reforms in other countries facing similar problems in terms of higher education student financing. Depending on how reforms in Brazil evolve, the country’s system may become: (1) the first large system based on income contingent loans (ICLs) in the developing world; (2) a complex system of grants and loans; (3) a mixed model with features from both the Australian and U.S. systems.
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- 1.
We refer to Western countries here as countries culturally influenced by European immigration. Therefore, Australia is considered here a Western country, even though it is geographically located to the east.
- 2.
Johnstone (2014, p. 236) defines tuition fees as “a charge imposed by the university or the state on students to cover a portion of the costs of their instruction—as opposed to a fee to cover one-time costs of, e.g., registration or graduation or the costs of add-ons like transportation, recreation, or technology.”
- 3.
Tuition fees can be charged by HEIs maintained by municipal levels of government, but they represent a minority of institutions and enrollments in the Brazilian higher education system.
- 4.
As with most Latin American countries during the same period, Brazil suffered with hyperinflation during the 1980s and early 1990s.
- 5.
The change of name reflects an ambitious expansion of its scope: initially referring to “Student Financing Fund for Higher Education”, the acronym FIES started to refer simply to “Student Financing Fund” in 2010, upon inclusion into FIES legislation of the possibility to finance vocational education and training programs. In practice, this modality has not been implemented yet.
- 6.
Programs mostly delivered online are not eligible for FIES.
- 7.
College enrollment rate is defined as the percentage of 18 to 24-year-olds (referred to as young adults in this indicator) enrolled as undergraduate and graduate students in 2- or 4-year degree-granting postsecondary institutions.
- 8.
The financial need is demonstrated through the FAFSA form. The FAFSA form provides the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) for each student. The higher the EFC the lower the student’s financial need.
- 9.
Public universities were tuition-free in Australia from 1973 to 1987.
- 10.
Attempts to reduce the initial threshold have been thwarted in the Australian parliament.
- 11.
The modality VET FEE-HELP, that offered ICLs for vocational education under the HELP system, was replaced in 2017 by the VET Student Loans program.
- 12.
Bond rates are a usual parameter for the government’s cost of borrowing.
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Nascimento, P.M., Resende, M.V.A. (2019). A Comparative Study of the Federal Higher Education Student Financial Aid Systems in Brazil, Australia, and the United States. In: de Albuquerque Moreira, A., Paul, JJ., Bagnall, N. (eds) Intercultural Studies in Higher Education. Intercultural Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15758-6_11
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