The empirical research examines the University for All Program (ProUni), implemented in 2005, at the federal level, under the president Lula da Silva administration. Qualitative methodology was used in the analysis of both the questionnaires and interviews with fifty scholars from private institutions of higher education and different courses in the city of Sao Paulo. The case study was use as a technique for reconstruction of empirical evidence.It was sought a sociological approach in the analysis of University for All Program in order to understand it in a different perspective than other surveys and studies, which ones focus strictly in its "privatization" aspect without considering and also integrating other dimensions, for example, the vicissitudes of access and the persistence of low-income youth coming from the public high school, the specifics of the selection processes, the emergence of a new social profile of a undergraduate student, the recent historical reconstruction and metamorphosis through which passes the higher education private sector and how this change articulates with the emergence of ProUni, the low permeability of the public higher education to the legitimate claims of working students who constitutes the majority of scholarship, the reflection on the quality of most of the institutions and their relationship to the process of ongoing "democratizing access ", among other elements. The nature of the subject required to draw, in a historical perspective, the creation and consolidation of what I define as for-profit private higher education in Brazil and also to advance the understanding of the recent metamorphosis of this sector, which since the late 1990s and early 2000s was gaining new configuration with the participation of large national and international groups.The analytical part of the data obtained through the use of investigative techniques guided by the articulation of four thematic axes in order to rebuild the family and working conditions as well as the experiences of access and retention of scholars in for-profit private higher education. The systematization of the convergent and divergent points among the respondents allowed to capture the singularities of these students, which provided nuanced views on this public policy which regularly is regularly seen in a homogenous and often uncritically way. Throughout the thesis, multiple heterogeneous aspects are highlighted which mark the paths of scholars: seizure of distinguished socioeconomic characteristics among students, distinct kinds of institutions in which they study, disparate formats of the courses they attend, among other elements.The empirical data suggest important differences among subgroups of three scholars (undergraduate students in specific license for education, undergraduate and technicians students), with accentuated benefit for the undergraduate students with regard to their educational background, social and economic origin, as well as cultural conditions. Thus, the undergraduate students subgroup accesses cou...
