Fundacao Getulio Vargas: Brazil Students

Interview with Fernando S. Meirelles, Academic Dean of IT, Fundação Getulio Vargas

Let’s begin the interview with a discussion on education. What is your general assessment of the education sector in Brazil; what are the challenges?

We have made a huge effort during the past ten years to include people who were not in the university system. However, the quality of 30 or 40% of these universities is not good enough. We have the top 20 or 30 universities being among the best in the world, but 30 to 40% of the new schools are not doing their job.

Speaking of the IT field, we have a shortage for the next five years of almost a million people that we are going to need but do not have in the system yet. We are trying to improve the system. The Ministry of Education is launching a new program giving incentives for schools to do a better job. But in general, you have to see that we have improved a lot in quantity but not in quality, and both are important. Even with improving quality though, we are going to continue to have a shortage in the IT field.

In Economist, there was an article about Brazil having an advantage due to its young population. If this population stays uneducated, it will be a major force for social turmoil.

We have a population bonus for sure. We have to manage to make those people more educated, keeping in mind that 30 years ago, we had a lot of illiteracy. Thankfully, the challenge now is at the university level, not the primary level, so it’s a process. Again, we have a problem but we have improved a lot recently.

Brazil is a major exporter of commodities. The World Bank is warning Brazil that if there is not a significant exchange of know-how, Brazil may face a commodity scarcity with no sustainable knowledge economy created. Is this a major challenge for Brazil?

Yes, it is. First, commodity prices are very good, so we cannot complain. In the next ten years, if the prices continue at the levels they are today, it is excellent business for the country to continue to explore those resources. Profits are large; larger than the profits if you go through the whole manufacturing chain. But we know very well that this is not good in the long run, so I think we have some companies that are doing an excellent job.

For example, we are exporting jet planes, which are not a commodity. We have several companies that are managing to compete globally and are doing very well. Innovation is becoming very important; the word “innovation” has even been added to the title of the Minister of Development; it is now the Minister of Development and Innovation to ensure that he is also managing to give more focus to innovation. The young people of Brazil have the tradition of having new and good ideas, but they don’t have the structure to put those ideas into practice.

We have several institutions that are trying to change this. I think that young Brazilians are comparatively in a very good position. We have several benchmarks; for instance, our students compete with the best business schools in the world, and at least two or three times a year we win the contest. The problem is that we don’t have enough good people.

What are you as a university doing to address these strategic issues? How are you preparing your students for the jobs of tomorrow?

In the past three years, we completely changed all our courses. One thing we have done with undergraduate courses is putting more chances out there for students to see things that companies were concerned about. We have more things to teach today that you want your student to get involved with in a limited time, which is a challenge faced by all universities.

We are happy with the changes we’ve made and I think our students are happy too. More importantly, the companies that are beginning to see the results of this process are happy too.

How difficult is it to get admitted to the university? Can you talk a little bit about the university itself?

The process of admission is based on our own admission test, not the national systems. The main problem is that we have two annual intakes, while the national process is an annual process. That’s why we are not able to use it, even if we approved of it. In the undergraduate faculty of management, we have 6 to 8,000 students for 400 slots.

Our challenge is always to have a system that enables us to pick the 200 best from the huge pool of applicants. In other faculties, the process and rates are different. Our courses are the most expensive in the country, but we offer loans for students in need of financial aid that can be repaid within two years of graduation. In this way, we manage to include the best students rather than the wealthiest. The way we measure success is that today 30% of the executives in the country are graduates of ours. This is our main benchmark. We have done well in the past; our challenge is to continue to do well in the future.

Many argue that 20 years ago it was good to study finance and economy, whereas now it is best to study agriculture with the rise in human population and their needs. What is your reaction to such claims?

90% of our students want to do their majors in finance and marketing. I always say to them, finance and marketing are the main subjects, but this is not the whole picture. I am trying to put incentives to get people more interested in other subjects. For instance, my subject is technology and innovation, and I think we need more people studying this as a major.

We need more people who are concerned about the efficiency of the public system, for example. We need more people running research institutions, such as Embrapa, that is doing a great job finding new varieties of sugar cane, for example. But it is not easy to convince young people that technology is more important than finance and marketing. The financial sector in Brazil is very strong, with the best salaries, and that is the narrow vision that they are focusing on.

Getulio Vargas foundation alumni that are leaders of companies in Brazil are responsible for more than half the GDP of the country, and we do monthly research on the economy and investment. In the past two years, what we measured is that every month, companies expected better results than the previous month. We are at the end of 2011 now, and companies are having problems all over the world, so the climate here is excellent, or even too good to be true, in comparison with other countries! We are very fortunate to have companies doing so well; they are hiring, we have one of the lowest rates of unemployment in the world, and there is a lot of optimism about 2012 and 2013.