The Politics of Privatization in Higher Education

Abstract

Before the Pandemic, privatization in higher education was on the rise. Countries as diverse as Egypt, Germany, China, Brazil and the UK showed an increasing enrollment rate of students at legally defined private or alternative higher education providers. According to Levy (2018) private higher education providers cater for nearly a third of global enrollment numbers. A key difference to older forms of private higher education is that the share of for-profit providers is increasing rapidly. In light of New Public Management-reforms a private or alternative (niche) sector of higher education has developed even within the most public higher education systems. The harmonization of degrees and the development of quality assurance frameworks allowed private providers to cater for defined needs of a growing customer base (Bloch and Mitterle 2017). Such providers tend to be for-profit and less prestigious, but play a pivotal role in expanding higher education participation. Next to an institution-based form of privatization, the Covid-19 lockdown has amplified a further aspect of privatization in higher education. Over the course of the last two decades, both countries and universities have invested in private digital education infrastructures, to manage teaching, research and administration (see Komljenovic and Robertson 2017). The recent wide-ranging travel, visa and contact restrictions have laid bare the extent to which public institutions across the world now rely on the logics and functioning of such a privatized infrastructure (cf. Williamson and Hogan 2020). Private services have become fundamental for public universities and their students to operate on a daily basis. Increasingly structural, regulatory but also pandemic conditions allow the boundaries between public and private to blur and amplify the role of the private in even the most state-centered higher education systems (cf. Cone and Brøgger 2020). Despite these developments, research on privatization in higher education in both streams is still limited. Reflecting on Privatization in higher education as a phenomenon spanning both the provision of private education and the more subtle privatization of teaching and administrative infrastructures, the panel aims to start a discussion on what private means in today’s higher education systems and how it can be framed analytically. - Bloch, R., & Mitterle, A. (2017). On stratification in changing higher education: The 'analysis of status' revisited. Higher Education, 73(6), 929–946. - Cone, L., & Brøgger, K. (2020). Soft privatisation: mapping an emerging field of European education governance. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(4), 374–390. - Komljenovic, J., & Lee Robertson, S. (2017). Making global education markets and trade. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 15(3), 289–295. - Levy, D. C. (2018). Global private higher education: an empirical profile of its size and geographical shape. Higher Education, 76(4), 701–715. - Williamson, B., & Hogan, A. (2020). Commercialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of Covid-19. Bruxelles: Education International Report.

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