Rethinking the Public-Private Mix in Higher Education

Book excerpt: In recent decades, we have seen the emergence of private higher education as a global reality. Although there are specific reasons for its appearance in each system, there is also a significant degree of commonality in the context and purposes surrounding the rise of private higher education as an important factor in many systems. The analysis of private higher education has tended to be focused at the national level, often highlighting national peculiarities and variations. In this volume the authors move forward by proposing a unifying and coherent, but flexible, theoretical framework that may be applied in different countries and diverse systems. Hence, the overall goal of this book is to provide a framework for a better understanding of the public-private mix of higher education and a set of policy guidelines in dealing with the expansion of private higher education from a comparative perspective. This analytical framework will be applied to four case-studies (Pakistan, Portugal, South Korea and Uruguay). These cases illustrate the diversity of contexts in the development of private higher education, though they also highlight important commonalities. Based on that analysis, we present some general recommendations to build a more effective policy-framework that takes advantage of the private sector in order to fulfill better the missions of the higher education system.