Cost-sharing and Accessibility in Higher Education: A Fairer Deal?


Book Description

The demand and the costs for higher education have risen steeply in recent years. The most common response worldwide has been some form of cost sharing: shifting per-student costs from governments and taxpayers to parents and students. This timely book provides a comprehensive discussion of the concepts and consequences of cost-sharing in higher education. It offers a comparative approach based on several national case-studies, and proposes alternatives to prevalent approaches.




Financing Higher Education Worldwide


Book Description

No issue in higher education is as salient, or as controversial, as finance. As demand for higher education around the world grows, so do the costs associated with it, especially as governments shoulder less of the burden. Tuition fees rise and student loan debt grows. Who pays for these surging costs? Who should pay? D. Bruce Johnstone and Pamela N. Marcucci examine the universal phenomenon of cost-sharing in higher education—where financial responsibility shifts from governments and taxpayers to students and families. They find that growing costs for education far outpace public revenue streams that once supported it. Even with financial aid and scholarships defraying some of these costs, students are responsible for a greater share of the cost of higher education. Featuring comprehensive economic and policy data, the authors' international comparative approach shows how economically diverse countries all face similar cost-sharing challenges. So, who should pay for higher education? While cost-sharing is both politically and ideologically debated, Johnstone and Marcucci contend that, for almost all countries, it is imperative for the financial health of colleges and universities, bringing better efficiency, equity, and responsiveness. Financing Higher Education Worldwide combines sophisticated economic explanations with sensitive political and cultural analyses of the financial pressures facing higher education throughout the world.




Rethinking the Public-Private Mix in Higher Education


Book Description

In recent decades, we have seen the emergence of private higher education as a global reality. Although there are specific reasons for its appearance in each system, there is also a significant degree of commonality in the context and purposes surrounding the rise of private higher education as an important factor in many systems. The analysis of private higher education has tended to be focused at the national level, often highlighting national peculiarities and variations. In this volume the authors move forward by proposing a unifying and coherent, but flexible, theoretical framework that may be applied in different countries and diverse systems. Hence, the overall goal of this book is to provide a framework for a better understanding of the public-private mix of higher education and a set of policy guidelines in dealing with the expansion of private higher education from a comparative perspective. This analytical framework will be applied to four case-studies (Pakistan, Portugal, South Korea and Uruguay). These cases illustrate the diversity of contexts in the development of private higher education, though they also highlight important commonalities. Based on that analysis, we present some general recommendations to build a more effective policy-framework that takes advantage of the private sector in order to fulfill better the missions of the higher education system.




The Modernisation of European Universities


Book Description

The recent decade brought about new ways of thinking about universities. European-level educational policies became increasingly influential as the agenda of university reforms was viewed as part of greater Lisbon strategy reforms. National governments adopted the economic concept of the university consistently developed in subsequent official documents of the European Commission. The EU member states currently need to balance their educational policies between the requirements of policies promoted by the EU and the requirements of their national systems. Additionally, the national educational policies are under high pressure due to globalisation. European universities and European academics operate in the midst of these large-scale changes. Their interpretations of and their responses to what is termed «the modernisation agenda of European universities» are at the core of this volume.




Knowledge Production in European Universities


Book Description

The book studies transformations of European universities in the context of globalization and Europeanization, the questioning of the foundations of the «Golden Age» of the Keynesian welfare state, public sector reforms, demographic changes, the massification and diversification of higher education, and the emergence of knowledge economies. Such phenomena as academic entrepreneurialism and diversified channels of knowledge exchange in European universities are linked to transformations of the state and changes in public sector services. The first, contextual part of the book studies the changing state/university relationships, and the second, empirically-informed part draws from several recent large-scale comparative European research projects.




New Languages and Landscapes of Higher Education


Book Description

The landscapes of higher education have been changing rapidly, with enormous growths in participation rates in many countries across the world, and major developments and changes within institutions. But the languages that we need to conceptualise and understand these changes have not been keeping pace. The central argument in this book is that new ways of thinking about higher education, the new languages of its title, are needed to understand the role of universities and colleges in contemporary society and culture and the global economy, new landscapes. Over-reliance on existing conceptualisations of higher education, has made it difficult to understand fully the nature of 21st-century higher education. It may also have encouraged a view that there is no alternative to the development of more marketized forms of higher education. The analysis offered suggests that the future is much more open. It argues that familiar categories, normally accepted as givens, are actually more fluid. 'Systems' of higher education, whether expressed through direct public funding or through regulatory regimes, are being eroded. 'Institutions', often assumed to be to be given enhanced agency by more corporate forms of management and governance), are no longer powerful actors, if they ever were. 'Research', often corralled by assessment and management systems, is becoming more diffuse and distributed. 'Learning', supposedly more focused on skill outcomes and employability, retains a more broadly educative function. The 'publicness' of higher education has not disappeared as public funding has diminished, but taken on new forms. With contributions from leading figures, drawn from a wide range of countries, this book provides an authoritative analysis of many of the major issues which dominate discussion with respect to policy, practice and research in the field of higher education, and it can expect to become a major source book for all who are interested in the development of higher education in the 21st Century.




International Perspectives on Teaching Excellence in Higher Education


Book Description

There has been an explosion of interest in teaching excellence in higher education. Once labelled the ‘poor relation’ of the research/teaching divide, teaching is now firmly on the policy agenda; pressure on institutions to improve the quality of teaching has never been greater and significant funding seeks to promote teaching excellence in higher education institutions. This book constitutes the first serious scrutiny of how and why it should be achieved. International perspectives from educational researchers, award winning teachers, practitioners and educational developers consider key topics, including: policy initiatives research-led teaching teaching excellence and scholarship the significance of academic disciplines research into teaching excellence rewarding through promotion inclusive learning and ICT. Teaching Excellence in Higher Education provides a guide for all those supporting, promoting and trying to achieve teaching excellence in higher education and sets the scene for teaching excellence as a field for serious investigation and critical enquiry.




European Higher Education Policy and the Social Dimension


Book Description

The Bologna Process has significantly shaped recent higher education policies across Europe but the impact of the social dimension has been neglected. This book provides an overview of the major Bologna reforms and through a cross-country comparative study discusses whether this social aspect can ever successfully be incorporated into policy.




Financing Higher Education


Book Description

The underlying theory of cost-sharing as well as the description of its worldwide reach were developed from 1986 through 2006 mainly by the works of Johnstone and his Ford Foundation financed International Higher Education Finance and Accessibility Project at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The principal papers from this project are reproduced in this volume. They examine the worldwide shift in the burden of higher education costs from governments and taxpayers to parents and students, and the policies of grants, loans and other governmental interventions designed to maintain higher educational accessibility in the face of this shift.




Higher Education in Portugal 1974-2009


Book Description

A comprehensive, wide ranging and detailed account of the unfolding of higher education and higher education policy in Portugal from 1974 to 2009 by leading policy-makers and scholars, with the explicit purpose of showing how different disciplinary canons and perspectives contribute to the study of higher education and higher education policy including Law and Science Policy perspectives. Whilst focusing on one referential system, this book deals with current policy issues emerging in the wake of the post Bologna period. It also examines their long term historical origins in addition to the measures taken to address them. The substantive chapters are preceded by a detailed Introductory overview that places the issues treated in this volume in a solidly European perspective and sets out explicitly the differences in the dominant political, cultural and social values that set Portuguese as other Continental European systems of higher education apart from their Anglo Saxon counterparts.