What he witnessed as a university dean, he added, was “more violent than the hazing that I saw in the army in Africa,” while serving there as a military doctor during Portugal’s colonial wars.

About 70 percent of Portuguese between 18 and 24 attend higher education, compared with 9 percent in 1974, when a revolution toppled Portugal’s dictatorship, according to Pedro Lourtie, a former Portuguese secretary of state for higher education. Yet in the 2013 Shanghai rankings of the world’s universities, no Portuguese university entered the top 300.

A dramatic change took place in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Mr. Lourtie said, when demand overwhelmed the public university infrastructure and opened the door instead to “a real business” of creating private universities.

Still, “the first choice of young people is to go to public universities,” Mr. Lourtie said. As for some of the private establishments, he added, “they want the recognition and probably overdo it sometimes in trying to show themselves as great universities.”

Diana Antunes, who is studying music in Lisbon after attending university in the city of Aveiro, said the drownings at Meco Beach “brought to the surface a real problem, which is that newer universities pretend they can be like Coimbra and use praxes to create an identity rather than focus on raising education.”

On a recent Saturday, she joined students outside Lusófona’s campus to pressure the government to ban praxes. Ms. Antunes, who is 28, said that not joining the ritual “makes you an outcast.” While studying in Aveiro, Ms. Antunes said, she experienced the pressure herself when she refused to join a hazing ritual that required simulating sexual intercourse, as well as licking yogurt from a boy’s lap. Her mother complained to the university, but no action was taken.

Still, other students have staged competing demonstrations in support of the hazing rituals. During a recent visit to Lusófona’s campus, students defended both the school’s reputation and its hazing activities.