This essay explains, by means of documental analysis as well as the analysis of the literature in the educational field, the precedents of the evaluation of higher education in Brazil, covering the period from 1960 to 1990 which subsidize the comprehension of the current Higher Education Evaluation System. The analyzed documents show that the public policies which have been developed for higher education in the last decades were initially underlined in the 1960s under the influence of the World Bank in the name of the "modernization" of the universities and the alignment between the political and economical bases of the Brazilian State and the needs of the capitalist system. It can be highlighted in the Altcon Plan, developed in 1968: the self financing of the public higher education institutions by means of their transformation into a profitable company with centralized management and no participation of the academic community in its organization; the need for organization and maintenance of reliable educational statistics in order to subsidize management; the flexibility of the teaching models. The other analyzed documents express the clash between the portions of the academic community in higher education institutions that seek quality in teaching, research and extension activities and the demobilizing and centralizing action of the State which from 1990 on has emphasized the development of neoliberal policies and considered evaluation as an essentially mercantile and regulatory process extinguishing the formative and emancipatory dimension of evaluation.
Public policies; Higher education; Evaluation
