Communitarian institutions for higher education: current issues

Abstract

Since 2010, the Brazilian communitarian institutions for higher education are not included officially under this designation in the INEP’s microdata, with the extinction of the category “communitarian, religious and philanthropic”. Since then, the Brazilian private’s higher education institutions are classified according to their legal nature: for-profit or non-profit. Nevertheless, the new law 12.881 of 2013, enacted in November 2013, has changed this reality after the approval by the National Congress, establishing the definition and purpose of the Community institutions, and confirming, in particular, their characteristics of non-profit institutions belonging to civil society, and their organization into associations or foundations (BRAZIL, 2013). The recent expansion of the federal and for-profit higher education institutions has directly affected the so far called communitarian institutions, which present differentiated characteristics compared to forprofit private higher education institutions as well as public education. In this article, data and contemporary aspects related to the new scenario of Brazilian higher education are analyzed, with special focus on higher education institutions members of the Association of Community Universities (ABRUC), and were found better performance of these ones in comparison to the private for-profit higher education institutions. The obtained results, combined with the regional impact of the communitarian higher education institutions, justify the importance of these institutions to improve the consolidation of higher education in Brazil.