Prouni scholars in the crisis of Lulism

Abstract

In 2005, the Lula government launched the University for All Program (Prouni), a public policy created to provide skilled labor, opening up space for 1.4 million people from lower classes to reach private higher education until 2014. Through the program, the government began to grant tax exemptions to educational institutions in exchange for the granting of scholarships. In this extended case study, ethnography was used in a large private university in the city of São Paulo, where young students of technology courses were questioned about lifestyles, opinions and expectations about education and work, worldviews and politics in particular. In order to maintain competitive conditions in the contemporary labor market, this group, especially incorporated by the productive restructuring, sees in the diploma an “fleeing forwards”, denying the characteristics that marked the peripheral Fordism of the generation of their parents.