As Brazil’s fiscal crisis worsens, education has ended up at the forefront of the government’s contingency plans. While lack of funding is nothing new for Brazilian students and researchers, the minister of Education claims that federal universities have become a place for “shambles,” instead of knowledge, sparking a deeper question: how much do Brazilian universities contribute to science in the country?
There is more than one way to measure the importance of a university. According to Brazil’s Intellectual Property Index, 28 percent of patent requests last year were filed by...
