The "massification" of higher education is associated to greater democratization of attendance by students from social and cultural backgrounds with fewer opportunities and less family tradition of academic education. In this article, we intend to discuss, based on the analysis of some indicators of strong growth that has occurred in higher education systems in Portugal and Brazil in recent decades, how the effective democratization occurred. Several points of this exponential growth and some regulatory mechanisms created, however, allow us to say that higher education was opened to the social strata and less traditional public education at this level, but social inequalities still remain high in institutions and programs, as can be observed by permanence and dropout rates. These phenomena have many causes, and can not acquit higher institutions from their share of responsibility for the problem.
Higher education; Expansion; Massification; Democratization; Portugal; Brazil
