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This chapter examines the internationalisation of public higher education in Brazil using the theoretical triptych of internationalisation as developed by leading scholars in the field: internationalisation at home (IaH), internationalisation abroad (IA), and internationalisation at a distance (IaD). This framework – while rooted in knowledge, systems, and scholarship from researchers and institutions in the Global North – is a constructive tool for categorising and understanding internationalisation at Brazil’s higher education institutions (HEIs) when coupled with an exploration of the history, context, policy, and dynamics of internationalisation efforts. The chapter then summarises and underscores recent and important scholarship by Brazilian researchers and others in the Global South that describes the history of the nation’s internationalisation efforts. It also critiques the powerful influence that Global North-centred objectives and priorities for internationalisation have on the process at Brazilian HEIs. Following a discussion of the theoretical framework and relevant literature, the chapter provides a case study of internationalisation efforts and initiatives of an elite public university, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). Content analysis of UFMG’s website and publicly available reports and data demonstrates a high level of institutional internationalisation that has unfolded in recent years, stimulated by federal funding and guided by a strategic framework developed within the Ministry of Education. An analysis of UFMG’s mission, partnerships and programmes finds that the institution serves as an example of internationalisation in Brazil’s public higher education context, as its programmes and initiatives exemplify the overarching objectives of internationalisation in Brazilian higher education.

Population worldwide has experienced several challenges related to sustainable development, such as scarcity of natural resource, unsustainable consumption, poverty, injustice, violence, social inequality and natural disaster (including floods, tsunami and landslide). These issues interfere in sustainable development and target to achieve societal balance, structuring without compromising economic and environmental resources of future generations. The higher educational institutions are included in this context because they play a role in professional training and in education to promote sustainable practices. The higher educational institutions can assume a prominent position in the 2030 Agenda implementation for sustainable development of the United Nations, especially in the Goals 4 and 10, quality education and reduced inequalities, respectively. The purpose of this research study aims to develop a literature review and analyze the higher educational and sustainable themes, involving the Brazilian scenario.

This research study develops a literature review based on researches that involve higher educational and sustainable themes in the Brazilian scenario. Inclusion criteria are papers in English, with the search equations in their titles, and peer-reviewed papers. Paper publication year was not an exclusion criterion. This research aimed to understand opportunity and challenge processes in the Brazilian higher educational institutions and their actions, so that the Sustainable Development Goals are completely achieved and the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development is fulfilled. For this, a research central question was established: What are the opportunities and the challenges to achieve the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development in the Brazilian higher education?

A total of 636 papers were recovered. The “Higher Education AND Opportunities,” “Higher Education AND Challenge,” “Higher Education AND Challenges,” “Higher Education AND Opportunity,” “Brazilian AND Higher Education” and “Brazil AND Higher Education” search equations found, respectively, 165, 146, 131, 74, 62 and 25 papers, involving 94.8% of the total number of the papers found. The papers recovered enabled the vision of five clusters: policy; inclusion; culture; relationship; and environment, society and economy. The paper analyses found that innovation process, sustainable practical implementation and holistic look, involving professors and students, can allow the 2030 Agenda achievement.

The authors of this research study presented a framework based on the literature analyzed through five clusters: policy; inclusion; culture; relationship; and environment, society and economy, considered from opportunity and challenge perspectives. The authors introduced and discussed the Brazilian higher educations and their opportunities and challenges. The Brazilian panorama was linked with the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, in specific, with the Goals 4 and 10. Implications of this research study are related to the higher educational opportunities and challenges in policy, inclusive, cultural, sustainable and relationship contexts, involving governmental and nongovernmental sectors, professors and students for the Brazilian educational improvement.

Few people with special educational needs (SEN) had access to higher education in Brazil until the 1980s, mainly due to their lack of access to basic education and a lack of specific public policies for this population. It was only in 2003 that the Brazilian government implemented strategies for the dissemination of the factors referring to inclusive education. The objective was one of the support for the transformation of educational systems into inclusive educational systems. As these policies are recent; few studies have been carried out in Brazil. According to Brazilian statistical data, the number of enrollments connected to special education in regular basic education classes, in 2015, was almost 751,000 students, while in higher education in diverse graduation courses the number was 38,000. In this sense, this chapter aims to unveil and discuss Brazilian public policies for the access and permanence of SEN students in higher education. Reflections will also be presented related to the evolution of the number of enrollments of students with specific SEN (visual, physical, hearing, and intellectual) in basic and higher education, as well as the implementation of public policies focused on this population in a Brazilian context.

For the longest period of its history, the university was the guardian and transmitter – not the producer – of knowledge. This relatively recent change of transmitting canonical knowledge and generating new knowledge is normally associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt. Other highly influential university models were provided by France and Great Britain. The association of certain types of universities with particular countries is a strong indicator of the intricate link between nation-state and education. Hence, the history of tertiary education and its elite institutions, the research universities, must be considered in relation with a sea change in educational history – the gradual emergence of national education systems. Only under the conditions of the by now standard form of organizing modern societies as nation-states did education become a central institution (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997) collapsing individual perfectibility and national progress. The nationally redefined university was integrated into the education system as its keystone while also being considered the motor of societal development. From a social history perspective, the latter aspect in particular indicates the pragmatic (training professionals, imparting military and technical knowledge, etc.) and symbolic expectations, “myths” of the nation-state that have been so aptly described and analyzed in numerous macro-sociological neo-institutionalist studies (Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992; Meyer et al., 1997; Ramirez & Boli, 1987). In a macro-phenomenological perspective, the term “myth” is used to denote a fundamental change in the self-description of European society which since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries no longer views itself as consisting of separate collectivities divided from each other by social origin – as was the case under feudal conditions – with each collectivity providing itself the necessary education for its members or being provided for by others in the case of neediness. Instead, as a result of a number of material and immaterial changes, society now defines the individual as its key unit, with the nation being consequently the aggregate of individuals and not of collectivities and the state redefined as the guardian of the nation. This conception might be taken as a kind of overlapping area which includes different approaches, such as Michel Foucault's concept of the disciplinary society (Foucault, 1977), Balibar and Wallerstein's (1991) deliberations on the relation between race, class, and nation, and Benedict Anderson's (1991) description of nations as imagined communities. All these studies could be taken as sharing the notion of “constructedness” (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1972) of modern society with the neo-institutionalist perspective. The concept of a “world polity” which encompasses the “myths” society is based on, the overall notion of a cognitive culture, which takes Max Weber's concept of rationality as a point of departure, is identified as the basis of isomorphic change in the organizational structure of modern education systems (cf. Baker & Wiseman, 2006). However, the strong emphasis on international, world system embeddedness of nation-states and their education systems is not to be taken as a unidirectional dependence on external forces. While modern nation-states originate from and remain tied to international dynamics and developments, they are conceived as unique entities. For most of their history, modern nation-states have been preoccupied with making themselves distinct from each other. Thus, while international competition has always been present, looking abroad traditionally meant reworking, adapting, and reshaping what was imported, or borrowed (Halpin & Troyna, 1995; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). This is true for education as well as for other areas of society.

This paper analyzes affirmative action policies that include racial and socioeconomic criteria in order to enhance the opportunity of access of underrepresented groups in Brazilian elite universities. It focuses on the public system of higher education since research universities in Brazil are mainly public and are free of charge. This renders them very competitive and highly selective. Emphasis is given to issues related to racial quotas, as the latter has been the subject of great controversy in Brazilian society. The experiences of three universities are analyzed.

Canada is a country that has a democratized higher education system, based on solid principles of access, quality and accountability. Brazil, on the other hand, is a country that seeks to advance its higher education system. For this reason, this paper aims to understand with the main stakeholders of the systems, the perceptions in relation to higher education in terms of access, quality and accountability, confronting two educational systems, the Brazilian and the Canadian.

The author applied an exploratory and qualitative method through categorical content analysis in a multicase study. Data were collected through 10 interviews with government managers, 18 unstructured (open) questionnaires, where 13 were applied to professors and experts in higher education and four to student leaders.

The results demonstrate that, for Canadian participants, these principles should guide any nation, as it is something demanded by society itself: democratic access to the system, that the available system has quality and that the resources allocated to the system are being well applied. In addition, Brazilian participants understand that it is necessary to deepen this debate, including a new principle: permanence, as it is a country of traditional social inequality.

This study presented the perceptions of an educational system based on the principles of access, quality and accountability, the Canadian system and the perspectives for a system that intends to develop in this context in Brazil.

Just over a decade after the first universities in Brazil adopted quotas for Afro-Brazilians and other disadvantaged groups, the country has implemented the most sweeping affirmative action policies in the Western Hemisphere. The surrounding controversy has inspired a large number of studies, which seek to evaluate the impact and scope of the policies, in terms of racial and social inequality, as well as to gauge perceptions within the public at large. This paper reviews some of the most significant findings of those studies, which have important implications for the global debate over affirmative action in higher education.

This paper aims to contribute to the development of a new concept of support for higher education students in public universities in Brazil. The recent expansion of enrollment in federal universities in Brazil, due to the affirmative action policies and increase in the number of admissions, has increased the number of students in need of special support, including financial help and special programs for academic support (language courses, enrollment in special projects, and others). We explore different dimensions of student support in order to contribute to a more complex perspective about the demands and expectations of these students.

This paper focuses on the analysis of how mass inclusion has taken place primarily in the private higher education sector. I present data on the evolution of Brazilian higher education, indicating the complementary roles undertaken by public and private sectors and their effects on the present configuration of our higher education. Then, I discuss the increase in higher education enrollment, in view of two factors: the widening of the supply and demand base – the former specifically by means of the expansion of for-profit private sector – and the adoption of mechanisms for access and commitment to higher education by public financing for students in private institutions.