Dear Hasan

The Brazilian higher education consists of 2,377 higher education institutions

The universities are schools that have at least one third of its faculty with master's or doctorate who are required to do research. Of total Brazilian HEIs , 2,100 are private (in 2000 there were 1004 ) - source: Ministry of Education and Culture

There are qualitative differences between public and private institutions .

The operation of private education became a right of modern citizenship in an individual privilege , converting its clientele consumers of educational products , imposing high financial and human costs to a significant portion of their students .

Also the criteria for opening new Brazilian universities are based , many times in political and business purposes , no longer valued as the most important criteria : strategic necessity , quality of faculty and therefore the quality of education in most of these institutions is insufficient .

When there is an increase in the population of a certain country, then there is bound to be an increase in the number of universities.

I do not think that it is wise to concentrate the students in one or two large universities. When a university has more than 10000 students, then it becomes difficult to maintain the level of education, to obtain an efficient outcome, and to promote the culture of competition & educational attainment (because these universities will feel that they have monopoly over the students of the country).

An increase in the number of universities has to be accompanied by a process of "sliming" the "huge" universities.

In my opinion, it is better to have 5 universities (with each having 10000 students) distributed in a certain country than having a single university located in the capital & having 50000 students.

I do not think that continuous growth is necessarily always positive. Some moderate-sized universities are keen on having a nearly constant (instructor/students) ratio range & these universities are doing well and have good rating.

On a short term perspective, the average quality of students education may be diminished, because new universities need up to 20 years to build the organizational culture required for high quality education. However, after roughly 10 years after start they should have a decent faculty population and the facilities required.

On a long time perspective, the high number of Universities may prove to be beneficial. This is because the most important drive to quality is competition and social development. A small number of organizations in one branch leads to low competitiveness, thus stagnation and low quality.

However in order for competition to provide the positive effect on quality, the role of the legislation and of the Ministry of Education is paramount. The ruling bodies must understand that quality improvements come from competition, not from protecting old, traditional universities, as they already have a head-start and a dominant market position. Over-standardization is the main danger as it does not allow universities to discover and occupy niches in the market allowing for a diversified education as required by the work and research market.

Old universities need the challenge of real competition in order to stay ahead of the work-market and research-market, and as a pool for experienced top faculty recruitment.