Book Description

This volume examines tuition fees as the most prominent and most visible trend among higher education policies that embodies recent neoliberal trends in the policy area of education. Tuition fee policies and the accompanying provisions for student support illustrate the contemporary tensions between marketisation and social justice. Among the major transformations higher education systems have undergone in the last two decades, the emergence of marketisation, and in particular the introduction of tuition fees, have received a lot of attention. In Europe, these trends seemingly break with a long-dominant representation of higher education as a public good, which has been at the centre of the process of massification of higher education access in most European countries since the 1960s. Against this background, the volume examines recent changes in tuition fee policies in a number of western European countries, Canada, the United States and China, and investigates the impacts of these changes on access to higher education. There are two main contributions the volume makes: first, it provides an overview of recent reforms in a comparative perspective, including a diverse range of national contexts; second, it elaborates a systematic analysis of tuition fee policies’ rationales, instruments and outcomes in terms of access to higher education. The volume argues that tuition fee policies provide fruitful grounds to explore the variety of neoliberal trends in higher education, that is, how marketisation and concerns regarding social justice are intertwined in contemporary higher education systems.