This is a serious claim backed by no evidence whatsoever. It's an idea that permeates brazilian academia, it's understandable to some extent, but fails to accomplish anything other than undermining ongoing researches.
http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!
(...)
Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, “That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn’t understand the problems.” Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that’s what it was.
Research in Brazil is a joke, as anything else related to education. Privately funded research is almost non-existent and public universities have typically a 2:1 relation between staff and students - all of them are pretty inefficient. Private universities are expensive scams.
It just doesn't cost for the (few) students themselves.
USP tuition is paid for by taxpayers.
It's a decision that is aligned to the principles of social democracy. You could argue against it, take a more neoliberal stance, but that's not the point. My point is that USP is trying to do something different.
I wish I knew more about how private universities in US are funded. I have a feeling that aside from the tuition students pay they still receive some sort of aid from the government.
True, everything has it price. But it's also true that free market is not really free.