Privatization's transformative effects on academia: promise versus products

Avery M.D. Davis and Christopher C. Morphew

Chapter 15 in Research Handbook on the Transformation of Higher Education, 2023, pp 224-239 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Privatization was initially promoted to improve higher education efficiency, diversity, and quality. One of the most fruitful frameworks from which to analyse this transformative notion is academic capitalism, i.e. market-like strategies of universities - and the supportive efforts of governments - to commodify the knowledge produced by professors via research grants, patents, service contracts, government/industry partnerships, and the recruitment of higher-paying students. The historical emergence of privatization occurs as governments’ disinvestment in higher education and neoliberal notions of how public institutions should be funded were embraced. Public policy around the world aimed at increasing academic capitalistic outputs, ultimately changing university behaviours. Apart from the aspirational goals of its advocates, privatization in higher education is responsible for persistent inequitable outcomes (e.g. costs, access, and gaps between haves/have nots). In this chapter, we describe and analyse the latter result given the promise of the first.

Keywords: Business and Management; Education; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800378216.00024 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:20314_15

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().