Abstract:

The role that higher education plays in democratization and the development of a country, justifies a deep acknowledge about its evolution and structure. On the other hand, a definition of public policies of education, requires that governments know that evolution, due to the greater number of criteria. In Portugal, the work of government agencies to provide numbers on higher education in the country has been notable, with regard to the number of students enrolled, as well as the number of 1st and 2nd cycles of higher education graduates, doctoral students and PhD graduates by scientific area in last decades. These figures testify to the enormous effort the country has been making to approximate the actual Portuguese rates of schooling to homologous rates in the more developed countries, in particular those of its partners in the European Union.

However, a criterion for the analysis of Portuguese higher education has been forgotten in official research and allows knowledge about the process of democratization/elitisation of higher education: the social and economic origin of the student population as well as the costs that students are forced to carry out to study - costs associated to the enrollment and attendance of higher education and living costs. For this reason, the authors have been investigating this reality since the mid-1990s by applying a questionnaire to a representative sample of public and private Portuguese higher education students. This application has already 4 editions: 1994/95, 2005/06, 2010/11, 2015/16.

The homologous data collected in the four editions of the questionnaire application are compared, aiming a better understanding of the dimension of the process of democratization of higher education in the country. From the analysis of the data coming from the 4 studies, it was concluded that higher education in Portugal, instead of democratizing and universalizing, seems to become increasingly a teaching for the elites.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Socioeconomic Origin of Higher Education Students, Democratization, Elites.