This study answers the questions that are being asked internationally concerning the following aspects of educational policies: The politics of policy making in education. How is policy formed and formulated? How do we conceptualise and understand the procedures and constraints of policy making at the local, the national and the global level. It focuses on how local power is exercised in implementing public policies for higher education in line with national power. Maffesoli (2007) points out that in our days we have changed from logocentrism to a lococentrism. Thus, ideologies no longer lead to the constitution of human groups, rather converging points do. It is in this context that we can realize the importance of municipal institutions of higher education in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. As the country is a federation, São Paulo is the most populous state, the highest income and production. Although the inland of the state was in development, it had no means to offer higher education to its youngsters. At that time, there was also a major expansion of Brazilian higher education as a whole, and municipal institutions of higher education came into being in the State of São Paulo.Until 1961, municipal institutions of higher education, as well as non-municipal ones, were created by federal decree, through Brazil’s central power. As of the approval of the first National Educational Bases and Guidelines Law, Law 4024/61, which, in its art. 21, § 1, offered for the first time in a legal text, the possibility of creating Municipal Institutions of Higher Education - IMES as foundations: public schools maintained by supporting foundations whose patrimony and funds come from the government. The objective of this study is to analyze the emergence of municipal institutions of higher education in the State of São Paulo during the second half of the twentieth century. The specific objective is to show that municipal institutions of higher education are a product of the local government in conjunction with the federal government in order to meet the demands of the rising middle classes for more openings in higher education. It can be argued that, when faced with the issue: What is the cultural change brought about by the emergence of local institutions of higher education in the State of São Paulo?, one can raise the hypothesis that the emergence of many colleges in the inland of the State of São Paulo, during the second half of the twentieth century, changed the region’s cultural panorama, breaking its isolation and providing cultural exchange between students from other places who came to attend the colleges and the local population. A second hypothesis that arises is that, through higher education, the inland towns of São Paulo were able to be linked to modernization and, later, to globalization, without losing their local references, because higher education is universitas, therefore universal.

This study presents primary data on municipal institutions of higher education in the State of São Paulo, and is part of a larger research project on Municipal Higher Education. The data were collected from sources published by the institutions themselves and by government agencies responsible for education, both at national and state levels. To this we will add Foucault's theory on the relationship between the development of scientific discourse and power, because the foundation of municipal institutions of higher education is a product of the local government. Maffesoli (2007) will allow us to better understand the relationships between local cultures and globalization, and finally the texts organized by Jourde (2007) will serve as a basis for comparison so one can reflect on the question of centralization and decentralization in European higher education .The procedure followed was the historical method and the quantitative analyses made use of the survey technique.

We expect to show that the local government may create educational institutions addressed to the needs of its population. However, when doing so, it should maintain and respect its link with national and, currently, also with international organizations.