Upward Mobility in Brazil and the Quest for Higher Education

By Jason Margolis. You don’t have to look hard to see signs of Brazil’s prosperity reaching the lower classes. When I visited some slums in Rio de Janiero, many of the modest houses and shacks had small satellite dishes on top, one tell-tale sign of people flirting with a middle class lifestyle. That measure is a bit simplistic though.
“First of all, you have to be very careful with this idea that there more people in the middle class,” said Eduardo Siqueira of the Transnational Brazilian Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He said these small signs of prosperity don’t tell the whole story in Brazil.
“The number of people who are poor, who got a little bit more money, does not mean that they became all of a sudden middle class, unless you classify middle class only by what they can purchase.” Read more...