Território e educação a distância: financeirização e digitalização do ensino superior privado no Brasil

Abstract

The interplay of financialization and digitalization processes produces a new geographical situation for higher education in Brazil. This situation, built by the dizzying spread of distance education in Brazilian territory in recent years, is largely led by an oligopolized private-mercantile educational sector closely associated with the global financial market. This sector comprises large education corporations with stocks traded on the stock exchange, such as Cogna Educação, YDUQS, Ânima Educação, and Ser Educacional. These education companies, consolidated through a symbiotic relationship between the State and the Market, the influx of financial funds into the education sector, the raising of public funds, the opening of capital, and merger and acquisition processes, now show significant interest in carrying out a "digital transformation”. Through the dissemination of distance education, equipped with the expansion of technical possibilities across the territory, these companies extend their territorial reach at a significantly reduced cost, primarily in the form of distance education centers, which constitute the most visible geographical fixtures of the spread of distance education in Brazil. There is also the production of a neoliberal psychosphere spreading in the collective imaginary, legitimizing the digitalization of education and the propagation of increasingly accelerated courses aligned with the fast pace of corporations. By surveying the distance education centers of education corporations, we demonstrate that the use of territory, treated as a resource, follows a univocal competitive logic, acquiring remarkably similar contours. There is a relative densification of distance higher education offerings in major urban centers, especially in the Concentrated Region of the country – areas more conducive and profitable to the distance education market. In these spaces, there are concentrations of technical and informational densities, as well as a higher concentration of potential consumers. Additionally, in these spaces, the contemporary acceleration is somewhat expanded, constituting a despotic synchronization that meets the demands of current globalization. However, it is increasingly necessary to consider the spread of distance education in subspaces that do not correspond to major urban centers. Municipalities with a population exceeding 20,000 inhabitants emerge as spaces of potential interest for this distance education market, adding complexity to the analysis of this process. One must also consider the impacts resulting from this dissemination, often overshadowed by the discourse of "democratization of access to higher education in Brazil". These impacts include the concentration of enrollments within a profit-oriented private sector, the spread of accelerated and low-quality educational models, the marginalization or overload of the teaching role and its precariousness, among other consequences.