This study aims to investigate the role of Private Higher Education Representative Entities
Forum (PHEREF – in Portuguese: Fórum das Entidades Representativas do Ensino Superior
Particular – FERESP), as a new organic intellectual and of collective basis, and also to
investigate how FERESP, within the current process of financialization of the privatecommercial
educational sector in Brazil, has contributed on favoring this sector in public
policies for higher education. Specifically, it aims to identify the evolution of the business
community in Brazil and its repercussions as great intellectuals of the sector, to analyze the
performance of FERESP within the scope of the Parliament, the Ministry of Education and
the National Education Council, and to analyze, through letters from the Forum, the
conception of higher education that this intellectual defends and potential changes that are
being incorporated in higher education in the country. This work is a bibliographic research
and a documentary analysis made through letters from each annual national meeting of the
Forum, through documents extracted from the official website of the entity, among other
documents. This work uses a timeframe between 2008 and 2018, beginning with the creation
of PHEREF, aiming to analyze its beginning and its modification propositions in Brazilian
legislation. The dissertation shows that the Forum brings in its political constitution a new
conception of higher education, aligned with privatist interests: an education conception
reduced to teaching bias – being it quick, as a commodity –, which transforms it in a financial
article. And that the Forum appears to exercise, as a political-business organization, a great
representativeness around the new policies that concern higher education in Brazil. Then, the
study suggests that PHEREF operate as an organic intellectual of collective basis since it is an
entity that has been introducing the construction of a public policy agenda for higher
education, with a view to favoring private institutions, especially the private-mercantile ones.
And that builds, thus, the strengthening of the process of financialization. The research
indicates that the logic of the Forum creation relates to an action in favor of bourgeois
extraction of teaching, for the construction of an agenda of changes which are represented by
lobbies. And it concludes that the Forum ends up subsuming the education into teaching
turned to the job market.
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