Commuting and Expansion of Higher Education in the Central-South Ceará Mesoregion, in the Years 2000 and 2010.
Commuting; Decentralization of Higher Education; Central-South Ceará Mesoregion
Brazil experienced, in the second half of the 20th century, one of the most intense and accelerated urban transitions in the world. This change occurred quickly, causing the country's population to go from predominantly rural to an urban and metropolitan nation, where a large portion of the population began to live in large cities. Consequently, population movements have undergone changes, long-distance migration begins to decrease, giving way to short-distance movements. Furthermore, commuting movements also gain in intensity, which are configured as daily movements of people who leave their municipality of residence to another, with the aim of carrying out some activity, commonly for work or study. Associated with this we have the changes that also occurred within the scope of public policies aimed at Education in Brazil, mainly those related to the expansion and decentralization of Higher Education, which contributed to the increase in articulations between cities due to the spatial mobility of the population, with emphasis on pendulum movements for study reasons. Therefore, this study aims to: analyze changes in the commuting movements (origin and destination) of undergraduate and postgraduate students at Higher Education institutions in the Central South Mesoregion of Ceará, in terms of the configuration of flows and sociodemographic characterization of these students, in a comparative perspective, through the 2000 and 2010 censuses. The importance of studies in the Central-South Mesoregion of the State of Ceará is highlighted, given the scarcity of studies specific to non-metropolitan areas, and this brings to light the relevance of the region for understanding the demographic dynamics of Ceará, the Northeast and Brazil, Generally. The research will use microdata from the Demographic Census of the years 2000 and 2010 from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics-IBGE, capturing information about the Central South Mesoregion of the state of Ceará. To process the data, SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciense) will be used to capture information about commuting for study reasons to outline the sociodemographic profile of these commuters. The results show that: the commuting movements carried out by higher education students (undergraduate and postgraduate) in the Central South Cearense Mesoregion did not have such an expressive representation in this mesoregion in the year 2000 and that this reality started to change in 2010; Iguatu is the municipality in the Central South mesoregion that receives the most commuters in 2010, attracting students from 10 of the 14 municipalities that make up the area analyzed. Furthermore, it was found that the decentralization of higher education had impactful effects on commuting in the Central South Mesoregion, as it contributed to the increase in commuting flows of students who make up the studied region.