On Monday (24), the Director of Higher Education Accreditation, Ministry of Education, Paulo Wollinger, emphasized during a debate in the Chamber, the difficulties that Brazil faces in order to be part of the Mercosur Higher Education (acknowledgement of academic quality) Accreditation System. According to him, one of the major problems is the lack of harmonization of curricula: "Today, in Brazil, we have six thousand distinctive names of courses. There are profiles which are completely different, even contradictory, with the same name".

Wollinger took part of the Higher and Technical Education seminar in Latin America, organized by the Committee on Foreign Relations and National Defence. He said that Brazil has around 26 thousand undergraduate courses, in almost 2.5 thousand institutions. Even though, the number of undergraduate students is small, of "only six million".

On June 2008, Brazil signed an agreement that forecasts the joint evaluation of courses - the Regional Accreditation System of Undergraduate Courses for Mercosur. On May, an evaluation of Architecture and Agronomy courses was initiated, and the enrollments for the Veterinary and Nursery courses are allowed. By 2010, Engineering, Medicine and Dentistry courses will be analyzed.

The Accreditation process lasts from six months to one year, as the president of Associação das Instituições de Educação Superior Públicas para a Educação a Distância (Unirede - Association of Public Higher Education Institutions for Distance Learning), Sérgio Franco explained. He informed that only universities can participate (institution with teaching, research and extension). Besides, applicants should have received a good grade in the National System of Higher Education Evaluation.

According to Franco, this job improves the teaching quality in the continent and provides benefits to the universities. According to him, when a course is accredited, professors and students may "be part of the academic mobility processes in the Mercosur".

Diplomas
The agreement signed by Brazil does not foresee the acknowledgement of the right to the professional practice in the Mercosur. However, the seminar participants believe that the mutual acknowledgement of teaching quality in different countries may facilitate the diplomas’ acknowledgement process.

The Committee on Education and Culture already denied an agreement between Brazil and Cuba in order to acknowledge the Medicine diplomas of Brazilians graduated in that country. The Government proposal is to establish a system of its own for the accreditation of diplomas from Cuba.

The Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Deputy Severiano Alves (PDT-BA), considers that the accreditation of diplomas of the Mercosur will help solve this problem: "We want the harmonization, not only for Cuba, but to other countries. As curricula are harmonized, we are facilitating students' life in Brazil and abroad."

According to Brazilian Law, it depends on the universities to acknowledge or not the foreign diplomas. According to Elizabeth Balbaschevsky, Professor of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP—University of São Paulo), since, most of the time, as the Brazilian university does not have a similar education to that of a foreign course, it just denies the diploma acknowledgement. "It is a wrong process; it depends on the good mood of the professor that will accomplish the report. There are no clear parameters."

Reporting - Maria Neves
Edition - João Pitella Junior
Translation-Grupo Solucion-SP Language Center