ABSTRACT
On the 17th of June 2019, the Brazilian Ministry of Education announced a new programme, ‘Future-se’, a programme that aims at reforming the Brazilian higher education system. This chapter provides an overview of the ‘Future-se’ programme. It discusses neoliberalism as a political, economic and social theory, and its implementation in the field of education. The change in scope for the financing of academic projects and programmes is a critical issue, and it has been criticised because there is a serious concern that it will lead to the privatisation of public universities and federal institutes. In general, federal universities have signaled that Future-se does not provide a solution to Federal Higher Education institutions’ problems. It is clear that the programme challenges some established conceptions about financing, quality of education, improvement of research capabilities and social inequalities within Brazilian higher education.
