The private expansion of Higher Education and university autonomy: the relations between the scientific and economic fields

Abstract

Through interdisciplinary analysis combined with bibliographic data and secondary sources, the study aims to investigate whether the private expansion of higher education is capable of strengthening university autonomy and contributing to the reduction of social inequality. The research was divided into three sections. The first rescues the theories of human capital and intellectual capital, presenting the impacts that the Fordist and flexible accumulation models have on the symbolic expropriation of workers. Based on the field concept developed by Bourdieu in the text “the social uses of science (2005)”, the second part deals with the relationship between teaching and the market, observing the trends forming the educational autonomy. The last section shows the concrete effects of the private expansion of higher education, referring, in a punctual way, how racial domination and the unequal social division of symbolic-material goods appear in practice. The study concluded that the private expansion of higher education contributes to the desegregation of that educational stage, relegating, at the same time, students and graduates without economic-symbolic accumulation to the worst academic-professional positions.

Keywords

• educação. capital. desigualdade social.