The BRIC member-countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - are experiencing a very high rate of growth in the demand for higher education. But they do not have the fiscal resources to meaningfully meet the key challenge of catering for the exploding demand without compromising on quality and equity. Each of them has adopted a stratified system of higher education - a few high-quality, elite institutions coexisting beside a large number of low-quality, mass institutions - to address the problems of access, quality, and equity, all at the same time. This paper focuses on this aspect of development of higher education, and examines its real effects on access, quality, equity and funding, and attempts to draw a comparative picture among the BRIC member-countries.