Recent trends in Portuguese higher education : closure, usurpation and differentiation

Abstract

In Portugal. the demand for higher education intensified during the sixties and continued to increase during the following years in such a way that mechanisms of control over access have been imposed since 1976. The most important of these mechanisms has been the numerus clausus. Faced with the implacable verdict of the numerus clausus and with the exclusionary perspectives it generates, each social class began to produce a new range of educational strategies in response to the increasing competition for educational credentials. The aim of this paper is to capture and to interpret those practices of social differentiation, taking as the main theoretical references both the weberian concept of 'social closure' as developed by Frank Parkin (1979) and the concept of 'strategies of social reproduction' (Bourdieu, Boltanski and Saint-Martin 1978). By using the available statistical data on higher education - namely the figures published by the National Bureau of Statistics and by the Department of Statistics of the MinistrY of Education, besides data included in some recent studies about university students - we intend to portray some of the strategies of exclusion and usurpation produced in this field which form, at present, an important part of the broader set of practices performed by social classes in their struggle for social positions.