Private Higher Education’s Quest for Legitimacy: Findings from a Comparative Cross-National Analysis

• In Event: Examining the quality of higher education: Achievements, barriers, and resistance

Proposal

As countries around the world have substantially expanded access to higher education (HE) in the name of national development goals (Schofer & Meyer, 2005; Trow 2007), many countries have also rapidly privatized their HE sectors (Altbach & Levy, 2005; Levy, 2006). The privatization of the HE sector has resulted in significant growth in the number of private higher education institutions (HEIs), with private HEIs outnumbering public HEIs and enrolling 32.9% of post-secondary students (Buckner, 2017; Levy, 2018). However, even with such growth the private higher education (PHE) sector has struggled to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the public, students, and the government with many still preferring the public HE sector.

Legitimacy is a key determinant of organizational survival and prosperity in that by gaining legitimacy, organizations can obtain the resources and social support they need to achieve sustainability and success (Díez-Martín et al., 2013). We were particularly interested in understanding the barriers encountered by private HEIs in building their legitimacy in the national HE system and how they navigated these barriers to establish legitimacy. To investigate this topic, we carried out a comparative analysis of the factors influencing the legitimacy of private universities in three diverse country contexts: Canada, China, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Conceptual Framework

Our analysis starts from the premise that private universities are primarily tuition-dependent, operating within competitive markets for students, and are often considered a second-tier option. They engage in various strategies to establish their legitimacy and also set themselves apart from other private universities. In our analysis, the concept of organizational legitimacy is critical to making sense of private universities’ actions. To achieve legitimacy, the actions of an entity should be considered as acceptable by society based on dominant social values (Suchman, 1995).

Methods

Data for this study came from a larger project, in which we conducted a comparative analysis of three country cases: China, the UAE, and Canada, each which was selected to represent different cases of roles of PHE (i.e., more, better, different). For each country, we carried out institutional site visits and/or interviews with representatives: Canada (N=5), China (N=12), and the UAE (N=6). Our interview questions focused on how universities understood their roles within the HE system, how governments regulated private universities, and challenges private universities faced. Interview transcripts were coded in NVivo using deductive and inductive coding for key themes. For this project, we focused our analysis specifically on the challenges private universities faced and sought to make sense of these problems through the lens of legitimacy.

Findings

A cycle of low legitimacy: The findings of this study found a very clear pattern, whereby universities profess to be trapped in a cycle of low legitimacy. In our interviews, private universities consistently pointed to competitive pressures. Private HEIs frequently mentioned their reliance on student tuition fees in the absence of financial support from the government. They also mentioned experiencing intense competition from public and other private institutions, which led them to lower admission standards and student performance expectations to attract prospective students and retain existing students. The lowering of their standards affected perceptions of their legitimacy, as they worried many families perceived them as being of lower quality and unemployable after graduation. Similarly, we found that private universities complained of experiencing significant public mistrust in all three countries. The lack of a traditional private university sector, the dominance of the public HE sector, and, in China and the UAE, perceptions of profit-making, undermined their perceived legitimacy.

Establishing legitimacy: In our analysis of how universities navigated these pressures to establish legitimacy, we find three main forms of support play a role. First, in terms of financial support, we found that diversifying forms of financial support would lessen competitive pressures. For example, in an important exception to the cycle of low quality, we found private universities in Alberta (Canada), where private universities are given block grants from the government, is credited with helping them lower tuition fees and attract high caliber students. Second, we found that the government and other civil society actors could build the legitimacy of private universities by lending policy support to private universities and signalling quality. In China, the government conferred legitimacy on some private universities often by allowing them to enroll international students or offer graduate degrees, both of which were understood by local audiences to be signals of quality. Third, we found that international claims were a proactive strategy that private universities could use to establish their legitimacy, particularly through alignment to best practices. For example, in the UAE, international accreditations and affiliations as branch campuses were critical to establishing legitimacy through claims to high quality.

Discussion

We argue that the largely understandable lack of financial support from the government seems to trap private universities in a cycle of low legitimacy. Being unsubsidized, private HEIs have little choice but to rely on tuition fees and therefore cannot be selective with who they admit. Further, to survive the intense competition with limited financial resources, they often tend to compromise their academic standards to retain students. Consequently, it can be difficult for private HEIs to produce highly skilled graduates for the labor market that contribute to national competitiveness, which exacerbates public mistrust and bias. Nonetheless, we found various ways that universities are establishing legitimacy, and highlight three important mechanisms: financial support, policy support, and international support.

Significance

In this study, we argue that although PHE can assume a larger role in advancing national development, their inability to establish themselves as legitimate institutions on par with public HE limits their potential to contribute. Recognizing the challenges represents the first step for private HEIs to overcome the barriers threating their legitimacy building. Our study also has policy implications for governments of dual sector HE systems. They may need to provide more support for PHE’s legitimacy building if they intend the private sector to play a bigger role in contributing to national development.

Authors

• Alison DCruz, OISE - University of Toronto

• Shangcao Yuan, OISE University of Toronto

• Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto OISE