Social Mobility and Higher Education in Brazil ∗ Javier Feinmann

We find that 85% of the students in the top 10% of the economic background distribution enroll in college at some point in their life, compared to only 43% for students in the bottom 10%. [...] Despite recent reductions in income inequality, it remains one of the most unequal countries in the world where the top 10% represent 58.6% of the country’s income and the top1% retain 26.6% of the country’s income. [...] For individuals in the top 10 percent of the high school income distribution, we see that over 90% of them attend college, whereas the probability is around 45% for those in the bottom 20 percent of the distribution. [...] In the y-axis we show the average wage rank at the age of 30 that students from the bottom 40 of the H. [...] Mobility rate corresponds to the multiplication of the average wage rank of students from the bottom 40% and the share of students from the bottom 40%.