The Changing Strategies of Social Closure in Elite Education in Brazil 1

In any contemporary industrial society, school credentials are powerful indicators of an individual’s worth and instruments of access to privileged positions. In Brazil, a country where income inequality is extremely severe, income gains associated to schooling are among the highest in the world, including several of Brazil’s Latin American neighbors (OECD 2013). Among all school credentials, college degrees are specially valued. They had already granted a distinctive mark to the agrarian elite that occupied leading positions in the complex state bureaucracy from colonial times through the first decades of the twentieth century. With the intensification of industrialization after World War II and the emergence of a modern labor market, college degrees have become critical to achieving the new upper-level positions.