The worldwide rise of private higher education [electronic resource]
Keywords: Education.

This dissertation explores the rapid growth of private higher education worldwide in three articles that ask: why, when, and how are nations expanding their private higher education sectors? Rejecting the notion that privatization is the natural result of high student demand and constrained public funding, I draw on macro-sociological theory to examine how the evolution of norms in the educational development community is encouraging the founding of private higher education institutions. My first article draws on a sample of over 700 UNESCO documents to examine evolving ideas about the relationship between higher education and the nation-state in international governmental organization discourse. Conducting both quantitative frequency counts of specific phrases and qualitative content analysis, I find a discernable shift from a focus on higher education for national development to higher education for global competitiveness. In the post-1990s era, private higher education is linked to ideas of organizational efficiency and educational quality through market competition. The state is no longer considered the primary funder and provider of higher education, but is imbued with important regulatory functions. In the second article, I draw on a new cross-national dataset that includes the founding date and sector of more than 15,000 higher education institutions worldwide to investigate what nation-level factors affect the founding of public and private higher education institutions from 1960-2005. I find that the expansion of the public higher education sector is driven by largely technocratic factors, including population growth and spending. In contrast, the expansion of the private higher education sector is associated with myriad national demographic, historical, economic, and political factors as well as linkages to the international development community. Additionally, all nations are more likely to found private institutions in the post-1990 era, regardless of their particular histories or linkages. I argue that the rapid, recent expansion of the private higher education sector reflects a particular orientation to market provision and funding in the neoliberal era that is not simply explained by growing demand. The third article examines how the model of private higher education advocated in international development discourse is adopted in local political and educational contexts through a comparative case study of higher education reform in Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco. I find that all three countries were encouraged by the development community to expand their private sectors. However, the French colonial legacy of Tunisia and Morocco is less compatible with privatization, leading to stalled policy implementation in both. Similarly, their policies of guaranteed access to public higher education create less demand for the private sector. I argue that to understand the extent of private higher education expansion in a given nation, we must understand how long-standing policies intersect with the global model of privatization. This dissertation's contribution is in its conceptualization of privatization not as a natural outcome of national pressures, but rather, as a global model for how nation-states should organize and fund their higher education systems. It is one of the first studies to provide quantitative, cross-national, and longitudinal evidence supporting this argument. A key implication is that nation-states worldwide are increasingly shifting responsibilities for structuring educational opportunities away from the state towards the market.