This study addresses the issue of student assistance at UFRJ. It has a particular focus on the perceptions of students who live in the student residence about existing programs at the university to support the stay of students in undergraduate courses. To support the study, an analysis of the current situation of higher education in Brazil in the context of productive restructuring and incorporation of neoliberal principles in the development of social policies was performed. This essay reflects on the concepts of social policy, citizenship and inequality, conditions that historically characterizes the access to higher education in Brazil. It also discusses the transformations of higher education in Brazil since the process of expansion of the education field with the policies of democratization of access arising from REUNI and Law 12.711 which describes the admission into federal universities and the federal institutions of technical high school education. The paper presents a brief history of student assistance in Brazil and especially in UFRJ, where its development resulted in the creation of the General Superintendent of Student Policies in the context of the approval of Decree PNAES. It is assumed that the policies of democratizing the access to public universities will only be successful if accompanied by actions that facilitate the stay, especially for students of social classes with economic difficulties or the unequal groups that in entering universities. The research is qualitative and it was developed with students, placed in housing program, who joined the university in 2009. Semi-structured interviews with eight students were performed. The results show that the exisiting student assistance programs at UFRJ have a great importance for the permanence at the university of students that are inserted in a condition of social and economic inequality. The data also indicate the need for both quantitative and qualitative expansion of the various services that compose the student assistance programs.