A política de assistência estudantil no governo Lula: 2003 a 2010

Abstract

The general objective of the research is to analyze the student assistance policy developed during Lula´s government (2003-2010) in order to attend undergraduate students of federal universities, especially at the Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA), identifying its impact concerning retention of these students. We started, centrally, of the question: how has been developed the policy of student assistance in the context of the politics access and retention of the students in higher education, especially, in the federal universities during Lula's government (2003-2010)? We start from the perspective that understanding this process assumes that we consider the context of capital's structural crisis, when emerging, on the political level, the neoliberalism and on the economic, the productive restructuring, with the redefined of State´s role as well as of social policies (including the student assistance). We adopted the methodology based in literature and documents, in the frame of references of historical materialism. In this sense, we analyze laws and decrees that concern to the defined objective, in addition to statistical and budgetary data about the expansion of higher education (undergraduate courses), particularly in UFPA. We work with the analysis’ categories of contradiction and mediation as addressed within the historical materialism, as mediations for understanding the Student Assistance policy subsumed in social policies and how they relate to the legal provisions that regulate the student assistance. We also used – as a category related to the assistance policy – the permanence which is central in this process. We conclude, among other things – in the interior of the adopted methodology - that the Student Assistance as established and institutionalized in Lula´s government (2003-2010), through PNAES (National Student Assistance Program), represents a conception limited, fragmented and focused on the poorest social segments of the population, considering this policy adopt the logic of lower budget feature to the largest quantity of care. This logic resonates in a negative manner regarding the permanence of students in UFPA and consequently the failure related to the conclusion of the courses, which removes from the Student Assistance her character of universal social right.