Affirmative actions and access from quilomboles to higher education

Abstract

As affirmative action policies in Brazil, in the last decades, they have been exercising primary function or facilitating resource of democratization of access to Higher Education, mainly for the inclusion of underrepresented ethnic groups. In this context, the present study aims to analyze access, completion, and evasion, as well as the courses and areas of greatest interest of remaining students from quilombos at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), who entered through racial quotas, to identify the results of the adoption of specific affirmative actions for this audience in this institution. This is descriptive, qualitative-quantitative, documentary-type research. To this end, data on access and permanence to undergraduate courses were analyzed based on the implementation of racial quotas for quilombo remnants who entered from 2005 to semester 2019.1. The results showed that the number of accesses to the University by them has increased in recent years, that the preferences are for careers in the areas of health and humanities, with more enrollments in the courses of Pharmacy, Nursing, Medicine and Languages and that the number of dropouts is low compared to a successful completion rate. The higher occupancy rate of vacancies in courses that train professionals in careers historically occupied by the elites denotes those affirmative actions are generating significant social transformations, which can lead to historical repair, recognition and the political, cultural and identity enhancement of the quilombolas.