Abstract
In my contribution I want to mark the contours of a new governance concept in the European higher education context. It concerns the notion of ‘market governance’ that refers to the use of the market mechanism of supply and demand in governance processes. In this governance mode, government interventions are focused on the shaping of a level playing field. While government intervention in the higher education market may be justified, it may come at the cost of lower consumer sovereignty and restricted producer autonomy. Through marketisation policy, students and higher education providers have more room to make their own trade-offs and interact more closely on the basis of reliable information. This contribution will present an analytical frame, which is based on eight conditions for perfect markets, to assess to what extent market governance has become a reality in contemporary European higher education. The analytical part concerns a cross-national comparison of eight European countries. It will be argued that there is still a key role for the government to co-design framework conditions and facilitate interaction in a more demand-driven higher education sector.
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Notes
- 1.
The governance equalizer, an analytical tool to frame modes of governance in higher education systems, uses this as one of its rationales (de Boer et al. 2007). The equalizer assumes that state regulation and market mechanisms can develop hand in hand; an assumption that seems to hold in practice.
- 2.
In real markets governments are customers as well. They pick the services of some providers for which they are willing to pay a certain price.
- 3.
With some 600 professors, 16,000 staff (13,000 full-time equivalents) and 20,000 undergraduate and post-graduate students, the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich and Lausanne and the four application-oriented research institutes – the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), the Materials Science and Technology Research Institution (EMPA) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) – produce scientific achievements of the highest calibre. Together they constitute the ETH Domain under the strategic leadership of the ETH Board as the supervisory body (ETH Act, Article 4). Appointed by the Swiss Federal Council, the ETH Board allocates funds to the six institutions within the guidelines set by the government, and administers their real-estate holdings on a fiduciary basis.
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de Boer, H., Jongbloed, B. (2012). A Cross-National Comparison of Higher Education Markets in Western Europe. In: Curaj, A., Scott, P., Vlasceanu, L., Wilson, L. (eds) European Higher Education at the Crossroads. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3937-6_30
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