[jecel]

One issue he mentioned is still true today in Brazil's universities: while in theory you can ask to transfer from one course to another, in practice you have to drop out of your current school and take the entrance exam for the other one. And then you waste a lot of time trying to get your grades for the courses you have already taken recognized as equivalent so you don't have to start from scratch.

For him to move from math to electrical engineering to physics in Brazil would mean going through this twice. This might make him take some 7 or 8 years to graduate.

I guess this inflexibility makes things easier for the administrators. They know they will have 25 students in the statistics class in 2028 and so know how many teachers to hire to handle that.