Brazilian education is marked by profound inequalities at all levels, including higher education. Despite being structural and going back to a long history of exclusion – of the poorest, blacks, indigenous, quilombolas, rural populations and students from public high schools – these inequalities had been lowering in the last two decades, because of important policies to expand the supply of higher education with democratization of access, such as: Fies, Prouni, Reuni, Enem, Sisu, Quota Law, Pnaes etc. From 2015, however, two crises followed and/or combined, developing circumstances that may have reversed the trend of improving equity in access to higher education. The first crisis, both political and socioeconomic, marked the period 2015-2017; the second, developed from 2020 onwards, was the crisis resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, with similar or more serious socioeconomic consequences than the previous one. This investigation makes use of information produced mainly by Inep – Censo Escolar, Enem and Censo da Educação Superior – for an exploratory analysis of the trends observed in this period regarding the number and profile of: (a) students who attended high school; (b) those who participated in Enem aiming at entering higher education institutions (HEI); (c) of those who had access to vacancies in undergraduate courses at public and private HEIs. The analysis led to the development of a repertoire of hypotheses that intend to contribute to the development of future research on the subject and concluded that: (a) the crises impacted higher education, but differently in the public and private sectors and in face-to-face and distance education; (b) there was both a marked reduction in the number of Enem participants and changes in the profile of participants, which may be related to the context of the crises; (c) the inequalities regarding students who attended high school in public schools and black people, either in their participation in Enem or in access to higher education vacancies, apparently did not follow the script of the crises, with a reduction of these for the greatest part of the groups analyzed mainly during the first crisis; (d) the Enem – together with the Quota Law and the Sisu – seems to have contributed both to cushioning the effects of the crises and to reducing inequalities in access to face-to-face public vacancies, for which it functions as the main form of access.