Explaining Institutional Change in Higher Education

Higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in OECD states over the past two decades. Some states have introduced tuition fees for the first time, others have massively increased public funding for higher education, and still others remain in stasis, retaining the elitist model with which they began the post-war era. This paper develops a formal model of the politics of higher education reform, noting the existence of a ‘trilemma’ between mass enrolment, full public subsidization, and total public spending on higher education. Propositions on this trade-off and on the impact of partisanship on reform are tested statistically on a sample of OECD studies and through case histories of higher education reform in Britain, Sweden, and Germany.