This paper aims to examine the design of youth education democratization policies developed at the beginning of the century. The data and analysis presented, which are part of a broader research that is funded by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), form two main sessions. The first aimed to reflect the inclusion of young people into basic and higher education as a result of policies constructed on the principle of legitimate inequality and not on the principle of equal access to rights from theoretical approaches to discuss the current historical movement of the new spirit of capitalism. The second session, seated in the empirical study of systematized and selected primary information from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) database, interprets the recent situation of the education of young people, 15 to 29 years old, and their occupancy rates in social life. The argument is that education policies for young people are the result of adaptation measures of Brazilian education to the logic of competitiveness brought in global capitalism, with features marked by the pursuit of a supposed inclusion/exclusion balance in relation to the historical limitation of governmental actions aimed at equal rights. © 2016, Centro de Estudos Educacao e Sociedade - CEDES. All rights reserved.3713712411267