How is the trajectory of the co-owner: from entering university to the job market

The Quota Law (12.711/2012), which completed 14 years in 2026, altered the profile of students in Brazilian public universities. Between 2013 and 2024, more than 1.4 million people entered federal education institutions through quota reservation, according to the Census of Higher Education, from the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (Inep). Part of the effects of this inclusion policy are also observable in the Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Between 2010 and 2022, the percentage of people aged 25 or older with a higher education degree more than doubled between Black and Brown people—the increase among whites, in the same period, was around 55%. In the public universities of the State of São Paulo, the impacts of the quota policy are also evident: at the Paulista State University (Unesp), the first state institution in São Paulo to adopt the system, in the 2014 vestibular, entrants from public school were the majority since 2017. The University of Campinas (Unicamp), in turn, was a pioneer among the paulista state universities in expanding quotas, reserving spots for transgender, travestian, and non-binary students in the 2026 vestibular. In the University of São Paulo (USP), which joined the quotas in the 2018 vestibular, 28.3% of entrants declared themselves Black, Brown, and Indigenous (PPI) in 2025. 2012: Law No. 12.711 created the quota reservation in federal educational institutions. At least 50% of the spots began to be allocated to students who completed high school in public schools. Within this reservation, family income and ethnic-racial belonging are considered criteria. 2016: Law No. 13.409 included people with disabilities among the beneficiaries of the quota reservation. 2023: Law No. 14.723 brought more changes with the inclusion of quilombolas, the reduction of the per capita family income limit from 1.5 to one minimum wage, and the alteration of the entry mechanism. Quota candidates first go through open competition and, if not approved, compete for the reserved spots. Despite the legislation guaranteeing the right to access to higher education, the challenge that arises for the beneficiaries of this public policy is permanence in the academic space. Data from the same survey by Inep show that in 2024, 49% of quota students in federal institutions completed their graduation, a proportion higher than that of other entrants, 42%. These numbers do not explain why most students, quota or not, have not yet completed their courses. Identifying the risk of dropout in advance has become the objective of a research, in the line of Aid to Research in Public Policies from FAPESP, at the Faculty of Science and Technology of Unesp (FCT-Unesp), in the Presidente Prudente campus (SP). Led by Sueyla Ferreira da Silva dos Santos, the researcher responsible for the project, the team used machine learning to build a risk classification algorithm for dropout, based on data from more than 50 thousand students at the university over a decade. The model analyzes different variables, such as students' grades, attendance, failures, course, and distance from home to campus, chosen from a statistical correlation matrix. The result is a system capable of signaling, already in the first semester, which students are at greatest risk of leaving the course. Among these variables, academic performance is what weighs most on the risk of dropout in the first year. It is also in this period that the student's origin makes a difference: students who entered through affirmative actions fail more than their peers. For the researcher, a possible explanation for this phenomenon is the response time of permanence policies, scholarships, and aid, which should support the student immediately upon entering higher education, but whose calls for applications usually open months after enrollment. Once the support arrives, "this problem is nullified," Santos says, and the academic performance of these students equals that of those who entered through open competition. Currently, the system works with an interface where different managers monitor the risk of dropout according to their level of access. A coordinator sees the scenario of their own course; a department head, that of their unit; and the rectorate, that of the entire university. The data reaches the team already protected by the university, without names, CPF, or enrollment numbers. Each student is represented by a code that does not identify them. "In data science, we do not work with information linked to individuals, but with the set of data. The important thing is to know the behavior of that group, and not that of certain people," says Santos. In practice, this allows a professor to identify whether the course itself has a risk of dropout and evaluate what can be changed in it, for example. The statistical model developed by the researchers is already capable of explaining the reasons why a student might leave the course. For the coming months, the expectation is to understand what leads them to continue their academic life. "We already know what makes them leave," Santos points out. "We want to know what makes them stay." A clue comes from preliminary seminars with the students themselves: they point to the library as one of the most democratic spaces in the university, in contrast to research groups and laboratories, whose access depends on a link with a coordinator. "Students do not always feel they belong to these spaces, because this will require them to have the best score, be approved in a selective process, or for the professor to elect them as someone with potential to contribute to the group," the researcher states. Ethnic Challenges The construction of this belonging, even under another perspective, also guides the research of the anthropologist José Maurício Arruti, from the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences at Unicamp. The study, supported by FAPESP, casts a new light on the access and permanence of Indigenous and Quilombola students in higher education. The research combines three fronts: the quantitative, which crosses official data, such as the School Census and the Census of Higher Education, from Inep, and the Demographic Census, from IBGE; the documentary, based on university calls for applications and interviews with managers; and the ethnographic, which closely follows the experience of these students within the university, in partnership with researchers working with specific groups, such as the Pankararu and Xakriabá peoples. The choice of a multimethod research is motivated by the particularities imposed by the data related to Indigenous and Quilombola populations. "We are facing a situation of numerous information gaps," says Arruti. An example of this is the scarcity of demographic knowledge about the Quilombola population, which was only officially counted by the IBGE in 2022. The Census of Higher Education also only included this population in 2024 and stopped recording this data in the following year. For the researcher, one of the criteria that weighs most on the permanence of Indigenous and Quilombola quota students in graduation is the relationship between the educational institutions and the student's place of origin. More territorialized universities, that is, closer to the villages or quilombos where their students come from, allow them to maintain links with the culture of origin through food, language, family network, etc. Unterritorialized institutions, on the other hand, receive students who drastically change their life context. This is the case of Unicamp, which received up to 80% of its Indigenous students from São Gabriel da Cachoeira (AM), in the far northwest of the country. According to Arruti, the distance and the cost of travel make the return home unfeasible for many of them. "It is common for them not to be able to return during the holidays, not to have money to go back," Arruti notes. "Not having the flour, that açaí or that fish they are used to also hurts," he points out. Difficulties like these have forced universities to adapt. At Unicamp, for example, spaces such as a garden with a periscope and a wall-less environment were created for meetings. At the same time, Indigenous and Quilombola collectives multiply outside the traditional student movement, opening new fronts of dialogue and demand with the reitorates. Another measure of adaptation by Unicamp is the Intercultural Formative Program for Entrants through the Indigenous Vestibular (ProFIIVI), which offers academic and interdisciplinary support to approved students before they begin the full curriculum of their degrees. According to Arruti, the program seeks to act in the first year, through an adaptation internship that favors the settling of Indigenous students in the courses. However, there is a limit that these adaptations do not reach: the criterion that defines academic success. Not every interruption of the course is dropout, argues the anthropologist. He cites the case of an Indigenous agricultural engineering student at Unicamp, who, despite good performance, decided to return to the village in the middle of graduation. Questioned by the student support team about the reason, the student replied that he had already learned what he needed in the academic space. For the researcher, cases like this show that the very definition of a successful academic trajectory can vary and that an indicator designed for most students can classify as failure what, for the student, was a fulfilled objective. "It is difficult to classify situations like this as dropout, because, for the student himself, he completed what he needed," he says. Crossing the Line Achieving the diploma is also far from resolving inequalities. This is what one study shows, conducted in the Observatory of Inequalities in Higher Education and Labor Market at Insper, coordinated by Professor Ursula Mattioli Mello, also with FAPESP support. The team crossed data from Inep with the Annual Report of Social Information (Rais), which brings information from all workers with signed contracts in the country, to reconstruct the trajectory of more than 20 million students who entered higher education in Brazil between 2010 and 2016, from the National High School Exam (Enem) to the labor market. The objective was to understand if studying in the same class increases the chance of colleagues working together after graduation and, in this case, which factors influence them most. The team analyzed characteristics such as gender, socioeconomic origin, and race, and discovered that the latter is the one that matters most in this equation. "People who are white tend to indicate more white colleagues. People who are Black tend to indicate more Black colleagues," highlights Eloiza Almeida, a researcher in the group. The pattern, which the researchers call network homophily, appears even in university classes that were heterogeneous and had the presence of people of different races, incomes, and origins. "No matter how much you studied with people from other groups, you end up having a stronger relationship with types similar to yours, and this persists after higher education, in the labor market," says the researcher. To confirm that this is indeed a trend and not coincidences, the team observes a specific moment in the life of professionals: promotion to positions with hiring power, such as manager. When a former student reaches this position, the data shows an increase in the hiring of people from the same class and the same course in that company. And the racial cut repeats: non-white managers leverage the hiring of other non-white professionals, even if they studied with colleagues from both groups. The strength of this effect varies by area. In finance, administration, economics, engineering, and information technology, the indication of classmates is more common. "It is normal for one person to call another," says Almeida. In education and medicine, the effect is smaller. Not due to lack of indication, but because these markets have fewer employers and greater regional concentration, which makes professionals find each other in any way. In law, an area where international literature points to a strong influence of networks on the rise to partner offices, the effect in Brazil is much weaker than in finance or engineering. In the next phase of the research, the team wants to investigate whether this network effect is equally advantageous for all indicated. The hypothesis is that Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Yellow professionals are directed to companies or positions with lower salaries than those of white colleagues from the same class. "We find it valuable to study together and that this relationship extends to the labor market. But if not everyone is in a good position, what's the point?", the researcher summarizes. The Journey of a Quota Student Who Extended the Link to the University Beyond Graduation *By Victor Martins More than 3 thousand kilometers separate São Gabriel da Cachoeira (AM), on the banks of the Negro River, from Unicamp, in the interior of São Paulo. It was this distance that Denilson Camico, 25, traveled to challenge dropout rates in higher education. At the end of 2026, the young person of the Baré ethnicity will graduate in pedagogy with a curriculum that includes an international exchange. At the end of 2021, Camico watched a lecture by Unicamp veterans in his school. "I was interested in the Indigenous vestibular to seek opportunities," he recounts. Without money for the preparatory course, he put together a self-study schedule with previous edition exams and was approved for 2022. The trip to Campinas put the student in front of uncertainties. Selected for the Unicamp Student Housing Program, he shared a house with four strangers. The displacement altered even the way he saw himself in the world. "Living in a city with a majority Indigenous population, you are not labeled like that. I started to perceive myself as Indigenous here in São Paulo. Before I had this notion," he explains. In addition to dedication to studies, Camico began to practice sports to meet people and get to know local customs. The adaptation was consolidated through academic extension. The production of a podcast that promotes dialogue between traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge—the Ecoa Maloca—opened the doors for an exchange in Portugal. The experience opened the way for scientific initiation with FAPESP scholarship. About to receive his diploma, Camico already applied for a master's degree at the Laboratory of Advanced Studies in Journalism (Labjor) at Unicamp. Looking at his own journey and guiding freshmen who arrive from Amazonas, he summarizes the role of affirmative action in his life: "The quotas were important because I was lost about how to enter higher education. Not that the path through quotas is easy, but I didn't have the information. When I had access, I took advantage."