摘要:Abstract The Federal University Restructuring and Expansion Plan Support Program (REUNI), Brazil, was proposed by the federal government in 2007, pointing to a model of university that surpasses the traditional university. With this challenge, it was instituted by Decree No. 6,096/2007 with the objective of expanding the conditions of access and permanence in higher education at the undergraduate level in order to obtain a better use of the physical structure and human resources existing in federal universities. With this in mind, this study, carried out through bibliographical research and documentary analysis, has the objectives of (i) presenting a brief historical context of higher education in Brazil, with a specific cut between the years 1988 and 2010, (ii) to analyze whether REUNI represented a step towards overcoming the exclusion and elitisation marks of public higher education in this country. It concludes that REUNI has brought quantitative advances in the expansion of public HEIs, which has led to the expansion of access to public higher education by students from low-income families and regions where there was previously no opportunity to join the federal network of Education. However, it is also important to point out that the expansion of public higher education institutions at the federal level has occurred despite many challenges, still to be overcome.