Education spending has increased significantly in Latin America, but less is known about how resources are distributed. Using original data, this study measures the inequality in per-pupil spending between regions with different levels of socioeconomic status within Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. We find that Brazil has the widest…

Montessori education is distinct for its implementation in 154 countries around the world. Lacking a Montessori trademark or comprehensive overseeing body, the expansion of the Montessori approach has often been diffuse and fragmented among competing organizations. The absence of centralized, accurate, and consistent accounting has made it…

This exploratory study responds to the criticism that non-instructional faculty or "academic professionals" at American universities are the cause of "administrative bloat." The purpose of the study was to build from the work of Rhoades (1998) and Kane (2007) to examine whether academic professionals at an R-1 (very-high…

This study provides comparable lower-bound estimates of inequality of opportunity for tertiary education (EIOp) for 31 countries in Europe, by using the two EU-SILC waves for which information on family background is available (2005 and 2011). The results reveal an important degree of heterogeneity, with Northern European countries showing low…

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic…

This study explores the question of how two public universities in Africa seek to improve student access, given the decline in public funding. Using resource dependence theory as a guide, qualitative approach via semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis are used to gather data to explore the study's objective. To examine the reduction…

The availability of public funding for private schools, in both primary and secondary education, has become a common feature in a number of OECD countries. The expansion of public subsidies for privately owned schools has consequences that go far beyond the involvement of private actors in the provision of education. These include deepening forms…

This study analyzes and discusses how competition-based funding has been institutionalized in the three North East Asian countries of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan since the neoliberal reforms in the 1990s. We found that states set aside additional, 'competition-based' funding for distribution among higher education institutions. In addition, private…

This paper examines responses to the trend for increasing participation in tertiary education, linking developments in higher education with those in apprenticeship systems, in Australia and the United Kingdom. In both sectors, expansion proceeded for several decades, but was robustly criticised in both countries. The expansion of access to these…

There is a growing consensus in political science research that higher education systems are classifiable into stable distinct types that reflect dominant trends in government partisanship. There is also a large body of higher education research that argues that higher education systems are changing and converging upon a neoliberal type, which is…

Neoliberalism was widely adopted both in South Korea and Taiwan in the mid-1990s. With governmental reforms, both countries adopted variants of competition-based funding mechanisms for higher education. This funding mechanism has been widely applied in most funding allocations for higher education in Korea from 2003 to 2017 and in Taiwan from 2004…

Over the years, there has been a tremendous increase in enrollment in higher education as well as the cost of attendance. This article comparatively analyzes the higher education finance between the United States of America (U.S.A.) and Ghana, taking into consideration the goals of higher education, enrollment and expenditure, and the various…

Higher education has expanded at astonishing rates around the world. We seek to understand the oppositions that periodically arise, which may produce enrollment declines and/or imposition of political controls. The post-1945 growth of higher education was -- to a greater extent than is often recognized -- propelled by the liberal, and later…

Increasing reliance on market mechanisms in higher education is analysed both as one of the approaches to steering as well as in relation to the consequences of markets for quality and accessibility of higher education. This article goes beyond the normative considerations of market elements as inherently good or bad and the economic theory-guided…

We explore how the influx of foreign funding into the higher education sectors of the United States and United Kingdom has raised the challenge of "reputation laundering"--when foreign donors and individuals use donations to prestigious universities to boost their international public image and offset negative images or reported…