06/08/2025

Folha: 'What kind of Brazil do we want to create?'

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de São Paulo.

In September I will be visiting several universities in China to participate in scientific events and give lectures, but also with the ambition of contributing to strengthening relations between the two countries in the scientific field, particularly in mathematics. China is positioning itself as a major scientific and technological power of the near future, and we have much to learn from them and everything to gain from an effective rapprochement with what is happening there.

The major problems (and opportunities) of our time – energy transition, artificial intelligence, public health and pandemics, environmental preservation, precision medicine, and so many others – increasingly demand highly skilled professionals in mathematics and its technologies, fully equipped to solve concrete problems based on evidence and data.

China knows this and has been doing the right thing: about half (!) of its university graduates are in STEM fields – an acronym encompassing science , technology , engineering, and mathematics. The United States, even before the absurd actions of the Trump administration, was already falling behind, with only 33% of graduates in these areas.

The situation is much worse in Brazil, where the percentage of STEM degrees is only 13% and, even worse, shows no signs of positive evolution. On the contrary, bucking the trend, enrollments in postgraduate programs in science and engineering have been declining alarmingly: a 12% drop in STEM sciences and a 28% drop in engineering between 2015 and 2022.

At the same time, Brazilian universities perpetuate training practices and policies that seem to ignore the country's needs. One statistic suffices to illustrate this disconnect: among the more than 40,000 different undergraduate programs offered by our higher education system, only 4 (none in STEM) account for more than 25% of total enrollments, while their employability rates hover around a paltry 10%. In other words, 9 out of 10 graduates of the most popular programs cannot find professional placement in their field of study!

At an event held years ago at IMPA (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics), filmmaker and journalist João Moreira Salles recounted his astonishment at discovering that the film class he taught at PUC-Rio was full, while the university's mathematics department had only one student. "A country that doesn't have a film industry, but produces 20 filmmakers for every mathematician, is heading towards catastrophe," he summarized, adding humorously: "Which will be very well filmed, but that doesn't make it any less of a catastrophe."

Read the full article on the Folha de São Paulo website.