The current literature often claims a universal trend towards increased privatization of higher education. Different reasons are given for this, for example, the spread of neoliberal ideology, the expansion of higher education and the consequential need to raise additional resources, or the emergence of a global educational market. The dominant view is that this trend will lead to increased convergence between countries, although some authors add that simultaneously one can observe a diversification of higher education within countries. Empirical data, however, shows that there are huge differences not only in the status quo, but also in the extent to which specific HE systems are affected by these changes.
This presentation will argue that some of the differences between systems can be explained, at least for developed countries, by recourse to Hall & Soskice’s Varieties of Capitalism approach. Hall & Soskice differentiate between Liberal Market Economies (LME) and Coordinated Market Economies (CME). While the former coordinate mainly through market processes, strategic coordination of collective actors plays a more important role in the latter. The dominant form of coordination is connected to other realms of society, e.g. the system of skill formation, through complementarities.
In a first step, some hypotheses on how the different Varieties of Capitalism are related to a different extent and form of privatization in HE will be deduced. For example, employees need more general skills in LME, and more specific skills in CME, increasing the demand for higher education in LME, which, in turn, increases the need to find additional resources to pay for extensive HE systems. More generally, the focus on coordination through markets in LME should contribute to a marketization of education in these countries.
In a second step, these hypotheses will be tested on the basis of qualitative and quantitative evidence by reanalyzing existing material (e.g. OECD statistics). In a third step, some conclusions will be drawn and the findings will be discussed in a larger context.
