Abstract:

Introduction:
Brazil is the Latin American country with the best legislation for people with disabilities. We define this group as people who have a long-term physical, intellectual or sensorial disability that may obstruct their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with other people. In Brazil, according to data from IBGE (2013), there are 12,896,000 people with different types of disability. The first Brazilian affirmative actions regarding people with disabilities appeared in the educational field, with the creation of the Benjamin Constant Institute in 1854, accompanied by the creation of the National Institute of Education of the Deaf in 1857; a fact that proposes education as a prominent factor for social change. Recently, government higher education has received interventions to ensure that disabled people have access to university courses. This movement, as a result of the Law 13,409 / 2016, led to university vacancies reserved for students with disabilities. This also impacted the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), considered the first and largest federal university in Brazil, recognized for its academic quality and research.

Objective:
In this project, we seek to verify if the scenario at UFRJ for students with disabilities had changed as a result of this new policy for this public.

Methodology:
Through a documentary analysis based on enrollment data for students with disabilities provided by the institution, it was possible to obtain institutional data regarding admission and permanence of all students with disabilities at UFRJ.

Results:
At UFRJ, between the second half of 2017 and the first semester of 2019, out of 200 students with disabilities who entered vacancies as a result of positive action in favor of students with disabilities (average of 100 enrollments per year), it was observed that 52 students suspended their courses or dropped out of university (26%). In the previous 10 years, from 2007 to the first period of 2017, we were able to register 320 enrollments in 10 years (average of 32 enrollments per year), which resulted in 104 dropouts (32.5%).

Conclusion:
Despite the legislation, the adequacy of Brazilian federal universities, in this case UFRJ, is still a necessary action, since the minimum operating conditions to meet the requests demanded by the courts does not exist. Despite the legislation, these social demands have accumulated for so long that the invisibility of the disabled continues to be reinforced. In this way, we experience a moment in which the law provides a positive strategy to guarantee the increase of social participation while, at the same time, the demands for recognition as an effective way to this full participation, are ignored. Therefore, at the same time that, legally, everyone has the right to a quality education, it is possible to notice the mismatch between the legal proposition and the difficulties faced by these students during their academic trajectory that affect their permanence.

Keywords:

Accessibility, Affirmative actions, Persons with disabilities, Higher education