The Brazil had always have a more or less of a welfare state. We have had public education and health for along time, even though their quality might be largely criticised. Public universities are specially important in Brazil. Almost all of the best Brazilian universities are basically financed by the state, and are free for the students.
The same goes for graduate studies. Most of the best master and doctorate degree courses are public. And more than that: a good part of the students receive scholarships paid by the government. Most of them come from two agencies: CAPES and CNPq, which are part of the Education Ministry and the Science and Technology Ministry respectively.
In 2008 there were a total of 24,520 + 9,005 = 33,525 master students receiving stipends, and 16,280 + 7,990 = 24270 doctorate students. Together they were 57,795 people, what is almost the number of employees of the Vale do Rio Doce or the Petrobras, two large Brazilian companies that are or have been run by the Federal Government in some moment in history. The Banco do Brasil, another important Brazilian state company, has approximately 111 thousand workers.
These scholarships have existed for many years, and their management is an important element in Brazilian science politics. Back in 1995 there was an important decision regarding them. The recently elected government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso ended the calculation of the stipend's values according to the professor's salaries. From then on the value was frozen, until 2004 when a raise marked the end of this policy.
Motives behind the decision to freeze were the need to drastically increase the investments in other areas of research, and the desire to reduce the age of the graduate students, the time they spent in the courses, and others things. For good or bad, freezing the stipend value was a deliberate decision, and the government followed it coherently for all those years.
The total devaluation due to inflation from 1995 to 2004 was something around 100% (20% only in 1995). Keep in mind that a few years before that Brazil had a very large inflation, and the value of most salaries used to receive monthly adjustments to compensate for inflation.
In 2003 Lula assumed the presidency. By then the landscape of Brazilian had also changed enough, so that in the beginning of 2004 there was the first raise in the value of the stipends since 1995. It was by 18%, taking doctorate stipends from R$1,072 a month to R$1,267. Stipends for master students are traditionally two thirds of the doctorate's.
In late 2004 the government released a document called Plano Nacional de Pós-Graduação, or something like “National Graduate School Plan”. In this plan there was a recommendation for a 50% gradual raise in the stipends value from 2005 to 2010. The raise in the beginning of the year and this document definitely say that the government put an end to the freezing of the stipends, and intended to keep its value in the future, if not giving it a “real” raise, above inflation.
After that, students only saw a new raise in the middle of 2006. It was by 10%, just enough to correct for the inflation in the period of almost two years and a half. This is quite a large period, considering most salaries are adjusted every 12 months or so. The minimum wage in Brazil is usually adjusted every year, for example.
The graphic below displays the value of the doctorate student stipend corrected by inflation, compared to the value in February of 2004, and normalized by it. We can clearly see the 2004 raise and the 2006 one, they are the peaks in the blue curve. The second peak is almost as high as the first one, and they are on the level of the stipend corrected value in early 2002. On the same time, the minimum wage has received yearly raises, all of them above inflation, making its corrected value gradually increase over time, as we can see in the red curve.
After the 2006 raise, in November 2007, the government announced a big plan to put money on science. They announced then that stipends would be raised by at least 20% in March 2008. It didn't happen in March, but in June it finally came. It was a 29% increase, making the value R1,800 for the doctorate.
Today, February 2010, we are already at 20 months since the last raise. The accumulated inflation in the period is around 8%, and there has been no signals there is another raise coming. In fact, a new president was recently appointed to the CNPq, and he has said in an interview in 31/1/2010 that they are not sure if there will or will not be a raise this year. They say they must see if it fits the budget or not.
If the stipend value is not raised in 2010, the two and a half years will probably devalue them by some 12%. As we can see in the graphic, the total raise corrected by inflation since 2002 will not be very large. The absence of a raise raises the question: what exactly is the government strategy?
Even since the freezing policy ended, there were only an initial raise followed by another two. With no raise in 2010, we will end up with only 3 raises in a period of 11 years where the accumulated inflation covers the raises. If they are planning to keep the value corrected by the inflation, they definitely needed more frequent raises. And if we are going to put in practice a policy of giving the stipends a real raise, above inflation, we need a better strategy. We need less uncertainty.
How come the government gives such a big raise in one year, and later is unable to keep the value even slightly corrected? The payments are being handled just too carelessly. And to see that, we can look too at the increase in the number of scholarships awarded.
In 2005 and 2007 the ammount of resources directed to paying the stipends, calculated by multiplying the mean value through the years by the number of students, was clearly lower than in 2004, 2006 and 2008. One reason for that could be that even years are when elections happen in Brazil, so it could be that the government plays with that money to make more people happy in election time. The 2006 and 2008 raises have even occured only a few months before the elections, in October.
It seems that in 2009 this irregularity ended, but the official number of scholarships during that year has not been released yet.
