The public/private divide in higher education: A global revision |
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Authors: | Simon Marginson |
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Institution: | (1) Monash Centre for Research in International Education, Faculty of Education, Monash University, 3800, Victoria, Australia |
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Abstract: | Our common understandings of the public/private distinction in higher education are drawn from neo-classical economics and/or
statist political philosophy. However, the development of competition and markets at the national level, and the new potentials
for private and public goods created by globalisation in higher education, have exposed weaknesses in the traditional notions
of public/private. For example, (1) the statist notion that higher education is always/already a public good blinds us to
its role in producing scarce positional private goods, even in free systems; (2) because there is no global state, both statists
and neo-liberals model the global higher education environment simply as a trading environment without grasping the potential
for global public goods in education – goods that are subject to non-rivalry or non-excludability, and broadly available across
populations, on a global scale. Yet higher education in one nation has the potential to create positive and negative externalities
in another; and all higher education systems and institutions can benefit from collective systems e.g. that facilitate cross-border
recognition and mobility. The paper sets out to revise public/private in higher education. Rather than defining public/private
in terms of legal ownership, it focuses on the social character of the goods. It argues that public/private goods are not
always zero sum and under certain conditions provide conditions of possibility for each other. It proposes (a) units in national
government that focus specifically on cross-border effects; (b) global policy spaces – taking in state agencies, individual
universities, NGOs and commercial agents – to consider the augmentation, distribution of and payment for global public goods.
This paper has been adapted from a keynote address to the Conference of Higher Education Researchers (CHER), University of
Twente, Enschede, 19 September 2004. The CHER conference was focused on the public/private question. Warm thanks to Erik Beerkens,
Jurgen Enders, Marijk van Wende, Ben Jongbloed, Guy Neave, other colleagues who took part in discussion at the CHER conference,
and the reviewers for Higher Education. |
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Keywords: | developing nations globalisation Higher education markets public goods tuition fees |
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