| Hello, *|NOME|* Last Tuesday (Nov 29), the IMDS and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) held the webinar "Evaluation and Future of Affirmative Actions in Brazil". The event brought together scholars from Brazil and abroad to discuss the impacts of affirmative action on higher education in Brazil and worldwide, and to discuss fruitful ways of reflection on the improvement of the Quota Law of 2012, on the occasion of ten years of its enactment. The first session of the webinar, from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm, focused on discussing evidence on short-term impacts of affirmative actions. Moderator Flavio Riva, PhD in public administration and researcher at IMDS, opened the panel mentioning the existing evidence around the effects of affirmative actions on the composition of the student body in higher education, on the behavior of students during Elementary, Junior High School, and High School, and on their trajectories in higher education. The points were addressed by the speakers of the session – Maria Caridad Araujo (IDB), Cauê Dobbin (CEMFI) and Ursula Mello (PUC-Rio). Caridad said that a fundamental part of social development involves reducing inequalities and highlighted affirmative actions as a possible compensatory policy alternative, which can have effects on inequalities arising from various causes. Mello discussed the short-term effects of affirmative action on the profile of higher education students, pointing out that the representation of black, brown, and indigenous students from public schools was deeply affected by the introduction of the Quota Law. Mello also pointed out that these effects were much more pronounced in more competitive courses. Dobbin presented results that reinforced Mello's findings and argued that the data do not seem to confirm the most common concerns – that there may be a higher dropout rate among students admitted by the reservation of places. The session was closed with a discussion on potential improvements in legislation and the implementation of the reservation of places, which today takes place via the Unified Selection System (Sisu). Mello and Dobbin emphasized the importance of a system of monitoring and evaluating the law, which is able to contemplate academic performance and the completion of university courses, in addition to subsequent results in the labor market. The second session, held from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm, was attended by researchers Fernanda Estevan (EESP-FGV), Ana Trindade (Stanford), Cecilia Machado (FGV EPGE and Banco Bocom), and Michael França (Insper). The panel looked at how affirmative action affects educational trajectories and the labor market in the medium and long term. França began the discussion by presenting the "racial balance index", which aims to measure race inequalities in varied contexts, and applied the methodology to the descriptive analysis of the distribution of places in Brazilian higher education in recent years. Trindade and Machado followed up by pointing out the evidence of the effects of the pioneering experience of affirmative actions in UERJ on the labor market. Focusing on the law course, Trindade showed, among other results, that the quotas had a positive impact on the probability of passing the OAB exam, required for the practice of the profession. Expanding the scope of the analysis for all courses, Machado described positive effects on salaries in the formal labor market observed 6 to 9 years after leaving university, but which dissipated in subsequent years. She suggested that one of the relevant mechanisms behind the effects found would be the construction of contact networks. Estevan focused on the Unicamp experience and showed that the bonus policy applied by the university was able to strongly mitigate the relationship between parents' income and (i) choice of more competitive courses and (ii) approval in them by the offspring – a particularly important result for reflection on the effects of affirmative action on social mobility. See you in the next “IMDS Letter”! Paulo Tafner CEO |
