UM scholar’s research contributes to fairer university admission process in Brazil

Inácio Bó, associate professor in the Department of Economics of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Macau (UM), has co-developed a new approach that applies economic principles to enhance the fairness of the university admission process in Brazil. The approach was officially adopted as a law in Brazil in 2023, leading to significant adjustments to the affirmative action policies implemented by public federal universities.

The approach co-developed by Prof Bó has become the official process used in Brazil’s centralised university admissions system (Sisu), where 1.2 million students across the country compete for about 260,000 places in public universities. Prior to this reform, an issue had emerged in the university admission process. In the first semester of 2019 alone, more than 10,000 students were denied admission to universities despite having outstanding academic performance and meeting the criteria for preferential treatment. This problem stemmed from the previous method of implementing the affirmative action policies, which divided university programme places into categories, such as ‘open seats’, ‘black candidates’, ‘low-income candidates’, and ‘black and low-income candidates’. This approach sometimes resulted in, for example, ‘black and low-income candidates’ having higher admission requirements than ‘black candidates’, contradicting the law’s intended goal of supporting black and low-income students.

To solve this issue, Prof Bó and his collaborators proposed a new method for selecting students that would allow candidates with protected characteristics to compete for all qualifying places. This approach completely eliminates ‘unfair rejections’ while maintaining the intended objectives of the affirmative action policies. Prof Bó collaborated with various stakeholders, including the Ministry of Education and multiple government departments, to refine the proposal and ensure its compatibility with the existing affirmative action policies. Their study, titled College Admission with Multidimensional Privileges: The Brazilian Affirmative Action Case, was published in the international journal American Economic Journal: Microeconomics in 2021. The full version of the article is available at https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/mic.20170364.

Prof. Bó’s research on the design of affirmative action policies also led to the publication of an article in 2024 in the Journal of Economic Surveys, titled ‘Racial and Income-Based Affirmative Action in Higher Education Admissions: Lessons from the Brazilian Experience’. The study shows how the standardised nature of affirmative action policies in Brazil allows for a richer and more rigorous empirical evaluation of the results of Brazil’s national centralised university admission system, and summarises its impact on admissions, school performance, and labour market outcomes in the country.

Prof Bó holds a PhD in economics from Boston College, US. He joined UM in 2023. His research interests include market design, microeconomic theory, and experimental and behavioural economics.