Admissions, enrollments, and graduations: numbers decline after period of growth
- In 2014, 378,000 new students were admitted onto engineering courses1 in Brazil, the highest annual figure ever recorded. In subsequent years, however, this number continually declined, eventually reaching 250,000 new students in 2019, where it has remained until now.
- The drop between 2014 and 2019 occurred entirely in the private sector (from 305,000 to 173,000 admissions). In the public sector2 there was a small increase (from 73,000 to 76,000)
- At private institutions3, the decline was offset by a higher number of students admitted onto distance-learning courses. The share of new students choosing to study via distance education (DE) increased continuously until 2021, when it reached a new record of 108,000 out of 249,000 admissions (44%)
- Enrollments follow the same pattern, albeit with a delay, since they can cover several years of admissions. The migration to DE in the private sector is also evident: enrollments in classroom-based programs decreased from 724,000 to 317,000 (-56%) between 2015 and 2021, while DE enrollments increased from 25,000 to 146,000
- The graduations graph shows an expected delay of five or six years behind admissions. In 2021, 105,000 engineering students graduated, 18% below the maximum of 129,000 recorded in 2018. This drop was similar in both the public and private sectors (-20% and -18%, respectively) over the period
Completion rate: 39% of students complete the course
- The completion rate is calculated as the ratio between the number of graduations in a given year and the number of admissions six years earlier4. The opposite represents the dropout rate
- Comparing the total number of admissions between 2010 and 2014 (1.42 million) against the number of graduations between 2015 and 20194 (552,000) gives a completion rate of 39%, or an estimated dropout rate of 61% in the period
- The dropout rates for the public and private sectors in the same period were 52% and 64% respectively
- Early estimates of the impacts the pandemic had on these indices can be made by looking at graduations in 2020–2021 and admissions in 2015–2016: in this timeframe, dropout rates increased to 66%, broken down as 62% in the public sector and 67% in the private sector
- It is still too early to assess the longer-term effects of the pandemic on these figures
Notes (1) The data considered all courses classified as engineering, which includes programs in the areas of engineering, production and construction, computing, agriculture, and similar. (2) Includes federal, state, and municipal institutions. (3) Includes private for-profit and nonprofit institutions. (4) The offset between admissions in year N and graduations in year N+5 reflects the fact that students usually graduate within an average of six years.
Source Updated microdata – Courses, Higher Education Census, downloaded in January 2023
Prepared by the FAPESP Studies and Indicators Team (DPCTA)
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