International sponsor entities’ participation in Brazilian universities has gone back dividing Committee on Education and Culture participants, on Wednesday (26). On the second public hearing about the committee subject, educational group representatives, who own foreign capital, have defended that practice and emphasized it is allowed by the law. Kroton, Anhanguera and DeVry Brasil group representatives argued that foreign capital have improved learning quality raising private college performances at the rankings of Education Ministry. Besides that, they emphasized that foreign resource entrance has increased transparency and competence at these entities budget management, without any interference on academic course conduction.

According to Luiz Kaufmann, president of Kroton Group, owner of Pitágoras chain, there are no reasons for fearing that foreign financing can threat Brazilian sovereignty at higher education. "Sponsors and sponsored have an independent relation in that all academic sponsored management is made of a highly qualified body of professors and following Ministry of Education guidelines. He added that foreign capital restrictions at learning to protect sovereignty does not make any sense anymore, because digital age allows a Brazilian student to make distance learning courses given at other countries through a computer.

Controversy
Deputies Nilmar Ruiz, José Linhares and Avila Lins have agreed with foreign sponsors’ arguments and highlighted that preoccupation must be offered course quality.

Yet for Deputy Wilson Picler, the international presence increase at learning should be monitored. "The Education Ministry representative, at the previous public hearing, said here that there are no evidences on institution quality improvement with foreign capital domain, he said. According to him, acquisition extension also provokes concerning. "There is a possibility we have the whole private higher education at foreign hands, because there is available capital in the world for those acquisitions, if we do not limit it.

For Deputy Alice Portugal, it is necessary to limit foreign capital on higher education in order not to harm the Brazilian academic sovereignty and neither the students. "Institutions need to be regulated in order these funds cannot have majority at the decision-making councils”, he opined. This is a volatile capital, the same one that had migrated at other crises. We have international experiences from large companies that dominate Patents, invest on specific labs for research and had done academic and administrative demands and management at foreign universities.

Projects
Alice Portugal é the author of the Bill 7040/10 that limits to 10% the foreign capital participation at higher education institutions. Yet the Bill 6358/09 of Deputy Wilson Picler limits on 49% this participation. Both of them transact along with the Bill 2183/03 of Deputy Ivan Valente, which only allows foreign capital to finance research and extension projects, or to support philanthropic or communitarian educational institutions.

Translation - Grupo Solucion-SP Language/Márcia Regina Monteiro Ferreira