A Political-economic Analysis of the Reaction of the Higher Education System to Major Societal Changes

The institutional character of the new mechanisms of steering higher education channels the behaviour of Hhigher education institutions and political actors so that behavioural patterns are increasingly of systematic nature and can be modelled similar to microeconomic decisions in the market place. By employing approaches from the Public Choice literature, public higher education institutions can be portrayed as suppliers of the goods research and teaching who are confronted with the demand of voters for these goods, expressed through the political process (Ziegele 1998). This political-economic framework makes it then possible to predict general reactions of the output of the higher education sector in response to changes of voter preferences in the society. The aim of this research is to investigate the reaction of the higher education system output in response to three major societal transformations: increasing income inequality, ageing of the population and growing mobility of students and skilled workers.