\n– A legacy for the future<\/a>
\n– Tools for planning the future<\/a>
\n– The race for excellence<\/a>
\n– Fuel for innovation<\/a>
\n<\/div>\n
UNESP was formed in 1976 by a merger of several existing schools and public institutes in cities such as Aaraquara, Jaboticabal, and Botucatu, and has always had a decentralized footprint, even more so after being granted autonomy. \u201cUNESP is the only state university with a presence in all regions of S\u00e3o Paulo, including those with a lower human development index,\u201d says Massini-Cagliari, referring, for example, to a campus established in the early 2000s in Registro, Vale do Ribeira, offering programs in crop science and fish science.<\/p>\n
Other cities where UNESP has recently established a presence include Ourinhos (geography), Itapeva (wood and production engineering), S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o da Boa Vista (electronic, telecommunications, and aerospace engineering) and Rosana (tourism and energy systems engineering). The university\u2019s program offering has grown from 54 in 1988 to 136 currently. Many degree programs at the university are both high in demand and well ranked, such as crop and veterinary sciences (Jaboticabal), medicine (Botucatu), and chemistry (Araraquara). But some, newly created programs have struggled to gain traction. Examples include the geography program in Ourinhos, which has attracted fewer candidates than needed to fill available places, and the tourism program in Rosana, where students are unable to find internship opportunities for lack of hospitality businesses in the region.<\/p>\n The new campuses were set up with extra-budgetary funds, but have to be maintained with funds out of the regular budget: a percentage of state tax revenue that was earmarked in 1989 under the state decree granting financial autonomy, plus revenues from industry collaborations, services, and financial investments. In 2015, UNICAMP opened a new campus in Limeira, housing its School of Applied Sciences. \u201cWhen this unit was created, the state government committed to increase the university\u2019s tax allocation by 0.05%, but ultimately failed to deliver on its promise,\u201d says physicist Marcelo Knobel, dean at UNICAMP.<\/p>\n Increasing access to undergraduate education was among the commitments required at the time autonomy was granted, with the three universities undertaking to offer at least one-third of their spots in night programs\u2014in the 1980s virtually all programs were offered during the day only, making them inaccessible to those needing or planning to study while working. Knobel notes that despite the growing number of places available at the three institutions, a large contingent of high school graduates in S\u00e3o Paulo is still unable to access public higher education. \u201cThe three universities now offer 22,000 spots each year. When combined with places available at federal universities and state schools of technology (FATECs) in S\u00e3o Paulo, the figure comes to about 80,000. But public high schools alone produce around 500,000 graduates each year,\u201d says Knobel, who currently serves as president of the Council of Deans of State Universities in S\u00e3o Paulo (CRUESP).<\/p>\n Neither USP, UNICAMP, nor UNESP would be able to dramatically increase their undergraduate spots, he says, without a toll on their also-important research and graduate education programs. But they have recently made efforts to tackle the elitization of high-demand programs, such as medicine and engineering, where places have typically been taken mostly by students graduating from private schools. Affirmative action policies have been adopted to aid students from public schools in getting into college, and to help make universities as ethnically diverse in makeup as Brazilian society. This has led to a growing presence of students from low-income families. At USP, for example, students with a household income between 1 and 5 minimum wages now account for 45% of freshmen, an improvement from 37% in 2017.<\/p>\n In the early 2000s, USP and UNICAMP introduced admission exam bonuses to facilitate admission for graduates from public schools. The strategy has so far been successful, but less so than the quota systems that have been in place at federal universities over the past decade. In 2012, the S\u00e3o Paulo government launched the S\u00e3o Paulo State Merit-Based Higher Education Inclusion Program (PIMESP), requiring 50% of places to be reserved for public school students and 35% for students self-identifying as black, mixed race or indigenous. To meet the requirement, the three institutions created quota-based mechanisms and other initiatives designed to reconcile diversity with student quality. Previously, in 2010, UNICAMP had already created a two-year program for high-achieving public high school students in Campinas, called the Interdisciplinary Higher Education Training Program (ProFIS)\u2014on completing the program, the top-performing students are waived through the admission process. This year the university introduced additional admission pathways, such as special admission exams for indigenous peoples and the opportunity for science Olympiad medal winners to gain admission without taking entrance examinations, a pathway that is also being introduced at USP and UNESP.<\/p>\n Academic freedom has also enabled S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s state universities to develop innovative learning experiences. A case in point is the School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities a USP campus built in 2005 in the east side of S\u00e3o Paulo, an area not previously served by public higher education. The campus offers a set of core subjects that are common across the different programs, a set of career-specific subjects, and coursework devoted to solving real-world problems, providing students with more freedom of choice. As a branch campus of USP\u2019s main campus in S\u00e3o Paulo, the new unit offered programs not then available in the city, including public policy management, information systems, gerontology, and textile technology.<\/p>\n \u201cAutonomy made it possible to achieve well-planned growth in undergraduate offerings and introduce innovative program designs that conform to national and state guidelines while providing new possibilities for students,\u201d says gynecologist Edmund Baracat, associate dean for undergraduate student affairs at USP and a professor at the School of Medicine (FM). Other initiatives include a more flexible medicine program curriculum at FM, designed to break silos between departments and campuses, and a new Institute of International Relations, with a cross-disciplinary program curriculum.<\/p>\n The challenge facing state universities over the next few years will be a much-needed overhaul of their undergraduate curricula, says Marcelo Knobel. \u201cThey\u2019ve become outdated. An education model is needed that involves fewer classroom hours and more hands-on experience. One idea would be to create a single admission pathway with different endings, allowing students to choose the path they will take during the course of the program,\u201d he says. Knobel believes institutions will become more interconnected when it comes to undergraduate education, allowing students to take courses offered at different campuses.<\/p>\n This is the fifth and last article in a series about the 30 years of financial autonomy of state universities in S\u00e3o Paulo <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Financial independence enabled state universities in S\u00e3o Paulo to double the size of their undergraduate student bodies and build a presence across the state","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":306175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[226],"coauthors":[98],"class_list":["post-328916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-policies-st-en","tag-education","keywords-university-autonomy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328916"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333819,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328916\/revisions\/333819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328916"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=328916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/048-050_autonomia-5-mapa-en-desktop.png\")
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