Entry into public higher education - differences highlighted with UFPE data between open competition and quota students

The Quota Law for Higher Education in Brazil, implemented as in the entry of 2013, was designed to facilitate access for students from public schools to higher education, in universities and federal institutes, and promote social inclusion. The law provided that within ten years, counting from the date of publication, a review of the special program for access to higher education institutions would be promoted. This work seeks to contribute to the analysis of law enforcement, especially by observing admission scores comparing quota and non-quota students. We analyzed data from students entering courses in the Basic Area of Entry (ABI – Engineering), Law and Medicine at UFPE, at Campus Recife, which are courses in different areas of knowledge. To analyze performance in the admission process, based on the SiSU grades, all students entering the aforementioned courses in the period from 2016.1 to 2020.2 were considered, totalizing 5145 students. The results reveal that there is evidence that the SiSU grades of students in open competition are higher than the grades of quota students, for the three courses analyzed (Medicine, Law and ABI-Engineering at UFPE), throughout the study period, namely 2016.1 to 2020.2, and also that among the quota students, those self-declared as black, brown or indigenous entered with lower average grades than the other quota students, in all years.