THE OFFER OF UNDERGRADUATE COURSES IN SOCIAL WORK BY EDUCATIONAL CONGLOMERATES IN THE NORTHEAST REGION
Education. Financialization. Educational conglomerates. Social work. Professional training.
This study investigates the offer of undergraduate courses in social work by educational conglomerates in the Northeast region. Its objectives are to understand the political-economic and socio-cultural determinations that have led to the incorporation of courses into the dynamics of the financialization of higher education, to analyze the impact of this process on the particularities of Brazil and the Northeast, and on professional training in social work. Our thesis is that the educational groups see social work courses as a field of profitability for capital, according to the logic of financialization, and, at the same time, an area for training a new intellectual profile according to the concept of flexible pedagogy, an ideocultural strategy for conforming the working class to the conditions of work degradation and dehumanization in the current stage of contemporary capitalism. This is a bibliographical and documentary study, guided by Marx's method, in which categories such as "work", "education", "state", "imperialism", "crisis", "financialization" and "regional issue" were addressed. The material analyzed consisted of official documents (MEC, INEP, FNDE, CAPES, CNPQ, IBGE, PNAD, TCU, CVM), those of private companies and multilateral agencies (B3, IMF, OECD, UNESCO) and those of working class and social service organizations (ANDES, ABEPSS, CFESS). The research universe was made up of publicly traded educational groups offering social work courses in the Northeast and the sample was concentrated on the five groups listed on B3: Cogna, Yduqs, Ânima, Ser Educacional and Cruzeiro do Sul, from 2002 to 2022. The results of the research show that the educational groups have led to the transformation of higher education, with a tendency to push for the reconfiguration of professional training in the region, according to the modus operandi of rentierism and the values of corporate management. This implies the creation, strengthening and reproduction of a professional culture opposed to the professional ethical-political project, based on pragmatic and technicist theoretical-political tendencies and low reflective density. Against this dynamic, this reality demands that the category, aligned with the hegemonic ethical-political project and the societal project of the working class, strengthen strategies aimed at a counter-hegemonic training
process, attuned to emancipatory values.