According to Nunes, Brazil in the mid-1990s practically invented the concept of for-profit colleges—before the huge growth of such institutions in the U.S., including companies like Kaplan and the University of Phoenix. And as U.S. for-profit colleges have seen dramatic fall-offs in enrollment in the last few years, in largely part because of legal troubles and widespread skepticism about their quality, those in Brazil have continued to grow. According to figures widely cited by Brazilian news media, for-profits now enroll three-quarters of all college students here, or nearly 5.3 million people—more than twice as many students as in U.S. for-profit schools. Brazil’s five biggest universities, by enrollment, are for-profit. One Brazilian firm, Kroton Educacional, is potentially the world’s largest for-profit higher-education company, with more than 1 million students on as many as 130 campuses across the country, according to its website.

The quality of public basic schools has also failed to keep pace with their breakneck student growth, even despite significant government spending on education. Just over 6 percent of Brazil’s GDP, and 19 percent of its national budget, goes into education—more than almost every country in the OECD. Yet the World Economic Forum ranks the country 105th out of 122 countries in the quality of its education system. Many, if not most, public schools in the South American country operate only four hours a day.

These shortcomings, according to experts, are what drive many wealthy Brazilians (most of whom are white) to enroll their children in significantly higher-quality private high schools that better prepare them for the university entrance examinations. "Much like what happens in the U.S., parents are preparing their children as early as elementary school to get into elite universities," said Gregory Elacqua, who studies Brazilian education and oversees the Public Policy Institute at Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales. "They invest a lot of money in private schools and tutors, they send their children abroad, they pay for test preparation, so they have every advantage."

And these tactics seem to work. Those who attend Brazilian public universities are both wealthier and whiter than the national average—68 percent of their students identify as white in a country where 48 percent are categorized as such, according to a study by the National Institute of Educational Studies, or INEP, a Brazilian government agency. "We have historically had an extremely elitist system where very few people could get in," said Dilvo Ilvo Ristoff, INEP’s director of higher-education statistics. "The more competitive [the program], the whiter the students are, and the wealthier they are."

And the rich don't only gain acceptance to the free public universities at higher rates; once there, they are more likely to major in disciplines that lead to high-paying careers, including medicine and engineering. While only 13 percent of Brazilians as a whole attend private high schools, according to the INEP report, 89 percent of those in medical school are private high-school grads, and 75 percent are white. Many lower-income students, meanwhile, end up paying tuition to attend for-profit universities, which specialize in majors that cost less to provide—such as accounting, management and teaching—and tend to come with lower salaries. This discrepancy, the INEP report said, "sharpens existing distortions in society" instead of blunting them.