The Worldwide Rise of Private Higher Education

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

My dissertation explores the rapid growth of private higher education worldwide in three sections that ask: why, when, and how are nations privatizing higher education? I draw on macro-sociological theory to examine how shifting norms towards austerity in the educational development community is encouraging the founding of private higher education institutions.

My first article examines the shifts in inter-governmental organization discourse concerning higher education sector over five decades, documenting the specific changes in language as higher education discourse shifts from a focus on higher education for the nation-state to higher education for global competition. To carry out these analyses, I collected over 500 policy documents from UNESCO and the World Bank, and use mixed-methods to examine trends over time. For this research, I developed an innovative research methodology that quantitatively documents changes in word count frequencies over five decades to visualize shifting global discourse around higher education. Qualitatively, I then tease out the frameworks used to justify changing discourse. I find a discernable shift from a focus on higher education for national development to higher education for global competition. In the new global era, IGO discourse advocates founding private universities in line with neoliberal ideologies while the public sector is re-cast as having a limited, strategic role in providing higher education.

Author

• Elizabeth Summer Buckner, Stanford University