Saudi Arabia, as delineated in its Vision 2030, has made increasing the participation of the private sector the utmost priority in the development. One of the key policies that Saudi is pursuing for greater private sector involvement is the privatization of government sectors. Parallel to this, higher education is no exception to this trend. A…

The time is ripe to reexamine the social contract between higher education and society. Historically, the social contract has promised an advancement of the public good through applied knowledge production and thoughtful research dissemination, training citizens to lead and actively participate in democracy, and supporting local and global…

We look at the expansion of a higher education system through the lens of concentration in the distribution of enrollments among institutions. Using data from the Brazilian Higher Education Censuses from 2002 to 2016, we found that the diversification of segments that compose the system was associated with an increase in concentration and market…

External privatisation of public education has emerged in Finland in the admission to higher education. A field analysis of thematic interviews (N = 22) with powerful actors in the private educational market and middle-class young people applying for places at universities in the highly competitive disciplines of medicine and law was conducted.…

This study discusses the impact of neoliberalism on legal education in England and Wales and the challenges and opportunities it presents. Neoliberalism is characterised by a focus on economic efficiency, competition, and individual responsibility, which can result in the commodification of education. The adoption of neoliberal policies in legal…

Globally, the trend toward privatizing higher education has been accelerating, driven by economic and policy shifts. Uganda has aligned with this movement, becoming one of the African countries implementing privatization to enhance accessibility and efficiency in its universities. However, the benefits and challenges of higher education…

The trend towards privatization of higher education has been a dominant feature in India, particularly during the decade 2010-20. The main research question enquired in the current research is regarding the evolution of privatization in India during the period 2010 to 2020 and its consequences for access to higher education in India. The…

The New Education Policy (NEP), 2020, adopted by Government of India, envisages significant and far-reaching reforms in higher education sector in India. In this article, I foreground certain peculiar features of the process of massification of higher education in India, including privatisation and fragmentation. I locate the political economy of…

Between 2003 and 2016, the percentage of undergraduates taking at least one course online nearly tripled, increasing from 15.6 to 43.1. Initially, that enrollment was concentrated in the proprietary, or for-profit, higher education sector. In response, and to make up for declining numbers of "traditional" college students and the…

From the perspective of peripheralised countries, internationalisation is imbalanced and hegemonic, as it is predominantly constructed by universities in the Global North. We explore the imbalanced internationalisation from the cases of sub-Saharan Africa through the dominance of Western knowledge systems and brain drain; China through isolation…

A recent global reconnaissance of Christian higher education found a number of key themes that shaped current developments, such as the pressing challenges of secularization and nationalization but also the advantages of privatization and massification. This article provides an update to this older analysis by taking a birds-eye view of trends…

The article re-imagines the current developments of Swedish education into a possible future. Historically, education was organized and funded by the state; however, reforms towards privatization in the 1990s implemented school choice, private schools and a tax-financed voucher system with the option of turning profits on education. A new judicial…

The neoliberal university which we inhabit is usually discussed in terms of policies, regulations and governing practices. Yet, academic life is steeped in affect. To illustrate that our political positions are imbued with and arise from affective positions, I present three stories of academics from public universities in Sri Lanka. These stories…

States founded, control, and fund public postsecondary institutions because higher education helps meet state goals. Public institutions of higher education provide considerable public benefits to states, but these benefits have not been systematically measured. As a result, public conversations about the broad value proposition of higher…

In the last few decades, the Chinese higher education system has changed considerably from an elitist model to a massified one with public and "minban"/transnational provisions. Accordingly, this study sets out against the context of higher education expansion initiated in late 1998 to critically examine the major trends of non-state…