Expanding equality? Institutional differentiation and reform in the access to higher education—the case of quota policies at USP

The central problem addressed in this article concerns a foundational issue in the research agenda on educational stratification, namely the association between social origins and educational destinations. A large body of recent literature in Brazil has focused on (A) changes in the mechanisms of access to public universities, and (B) the effects of the expansion of higher education on opportunity structures and social selectivity in access to tertiary education. Building on this research agenda, this article analyses access to public higher education, focusing more specifically on the case of the University of São Paulo (USP), which has implemented a significant set of changes in its admission mechanisms. Using socioeconomic and academic performance data on applicants, we estimate models with admission as the dependent variable. The results indicate that the university’s quota policy has fostered processes of inclusion primarily among students from the public school sector, although similar effects are also observed among black, pardo, and native students. Characterized by patterns of horizontal stratification in access, the implementation of the policy has established distinct opportunity structures through differentiation, contributing to a reversal of long-standing trends of social inequality reproduction in access to USP.