Campus Pontal da UFU: espaço socialmente produzido a partir das políticas de expansão do acesso e permanência ao ensino superior

Abstract

The current research has as its object Campus Pontal, one of the campuses of the Federal Univesity of Uberlândia – UFU. Located in Ituiutaba, a municipality in the Brazilian State of Minas Gerais, the campus was created when the federal government lauched a program named ‘Expansão Fase I’aiming to expand the access to higher education, making it available for more citizens in the most remote places of inland Brazil. The research aimed to investigate: to what extent the geographic space of the city and the university campus present as a difficulty to the student in the process of staying in higher education? The main scope of this research is to comprehend the policy designed to maintain students on a peripheral campus and its relation with the resulting social environment. In order to reach the main purpose, some specific objectives were delimited: to proceed with a survey of the policies regarding the expansion of higher education in the country in the period from 2003 to 2010; to analyze and discuss indicators in order to verify to what extension did the efforts guarantee a more democratic access for future students; to investigate possible reations between the geographic space and the difficulties students face regarding their permanence in the new campus for the whole lenght of a chosen course. The research was based on qualitative methods and techniques through a series of phases: delimitation of the scope, bibliographic, documentary and field researches and data analysis. The bibliographic research covered the following topics: higher education and its expansion and democratization; geographic space, social environment and research methods, in order to establish a historic perspective for the expansion of higher education in Brazil in the period mentioned above (2003 to 2010), and was based on the research already published by authors like Fávero, Cunha, Saviani, Ferreira and Oliveira, Dias Sobrinho, Santos, Souza and Rolim among others. The documentary research used different sources, like public documents e statistics from official government bodies. The analysis of collected data indicates a true relation between the geographical space and social environment of the campus and the permanence of students at the university until graduation. Variables like distance from campus to hometown, household income, availability of public services (such as security and transportation), the business environment in the city and costs of housing were considered and suggested a certain distance between life in campus and off campus, both physically and symbolically. The democratization (or universalization) of higher education, if occurred, seems to be restricted to the access itself, not reflecting directly on an increase of graduate students.