Universities corp.

educational industry, financial capital, and social exclusion

Abstract

The action of large companies in Higher Education has been intensifying since the end of the 2000s, transforming Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) into companies belonging to Higher Education holding companies. Publicly traded company that receive national and foreign capital traded on the stock exchange. Process that has been called financialization. This reality has profound implications for society's access to higher education, the socialization of scientific knowledge and the organization of teaching work. To understand such phenomena, we delimited the Estácio de Sá Higher Education Society, based in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Supporter of the Universidade Estácio de Sá, a company in the YDUQS Participações S.A group, as the object of our analysis. Our objective is to analyze the impacts of the financialization process on leading private HEIs in the educational market. Investigating the financialization effects of higher education on the socialization of scientific and technological knowledge and society's access to higher education, as well as the reorganization of private HEIs under the logic of the financial market. As a result, we showed how the dynamics of financialization led YDUQS to stratify undergraduate courses by income range, limiting the face-to-face modality to the most expensive courses of the so-called “Premium Education”, while the other courses are totally or partially taught in the distance learning modality. We conclude that the commodification of Higher Education results in the transformation of a social right into a service increasingly mediated by the interests of the financial market.