Brazil Will Reserve Seats at Public Universities for Low-Income Students

Brazil’s Senate has passed a law that will vastly increase the number of underprivileged students in the country’s federal universities and technical schools.
The president is expected to approve the main parts of the bill. Under the new law, 50 percent of all places at the free public universities will be set aside for students who studied in state -run secondary schools. The distribution will be weighted by color and race. Of that 50 percent, half of the available openings will be given to students whose family income is less than $460 per person.
The legislation is the latest in a long and sometimes bitter battle to make Brazil’s top public universities more accessible to the country’s poor, who often struggle to gain admission because of the low quality of education at state-run high schools.