Volunteering, Faculty Training and Student Support in Brazil

Higher education in Brazil started in the nineteenth century and can be considered recent compared to other countries such as Peru, where the National University of San Marcos, the oldest in the Americas, was founded in 1551 or the Real Pontifical University of Mexico in 1613 or Harvard University in 1636. The first institution of higher education in Brazil was the School of Surgery of Bahia in 1808. Brazilian universities did not emerge as teaching in the traditional models of other countries. They were created as isolated schools to train liberal professionals and possibly to serve minorities as opposed to meeting the fundamental needs of the society in which they were inserted. In 1920 the Brazilian Federal Government legally created the University of Rio de Janeiro, the first Brazilian university.

Almost 100 years after the emergence of the first university, data published in 2017 by the Census of Higher Education in Brazil (Brasil 2019b) shows that the Brazilian federal system...