Private higher education (PHE) has grown enormously and become quite diversified. While concentrated in Asia and the Americas, PHE is nearly ubiquitous globally. This overview identifies broader PHE patterns and the chief ways that regional and country variation bend or even break from the geographically broad patterns. Striking differences persist between private and public, and new differences arise. Few key concerns in contemporary higher education can any longer be contemplated without the inclusion of PHE.

Private higher education (PHE) has grown enormously and become quite diversified in its manifestations and activities. The last redoubts of public higher education monopoly have yielded to dual-sector systems. Recent state recognition of Algerian and Greek PHE leaves Cuba as the only not-tiny higher education system without PHE. PHE accounts now for a third of worldwide higher education enrollment.

The book A World of Private Higher Education is this author’s attempt to assess the startling rise and characteristics of PHE globally. It provides frameworks for analyzing and understanding PHE anywhere in comparative and historical perspective. It claims to identify patterns that characterize PHE broadly, including in contrast to public higher education, as well as to identify the chief ways that regional and country variation bend or even break from the geographically broad patterns.

Ubiquity does not equate to equal geographical spread. Asia alone has a majority of PHE enrollment, a larger majority than it has of total higher education. Latin America, second in PHE raw enrollment, has the largest PHE share of total enrollment, slightly over 50 percent. PHE in the United States, while now dwarfed by that of India and below the global average, remains the towering PHE giant in academic standing and international, social, economic, and political importance.

Recent decades of private growth have been concentrated heavily in developing countries, and the situation will unlikely to change—with the exception of two major developed country outliers, Japan and South Korea, where the current private enrollment constitutes roughly 80 percent and is declining. Yet, illustrating continued global vibrancy and surprises within PHE, Western Europe has seen enrollment of 12 percent and 1.6 million students in 2000 grow to nearly 20 percent and 3.8 million today.

Patterns

The significance of PHE’s global surge relates to PHE’s nature or, more accurately, varied natures. PHE is not a homogeneous phenomenon. Research establishes fundamental and abiding distinctiveness between private and public. Plainest in finance, the distinctiveness exists in governance and missions (or functions) as well. Thus, we can identify private-public distinctiveness in academic, cultural, social, economic, and political realms. As that distinctiveness is not always the same distinctiveness, it is important that we can now identify the principal sorts of distinctiveness found, where and when. An abiding generalization remains, however, that PHE almost always has significantly more privateness (with private stakeholders, activities, and interests) than public higher education does, while public higher education has considerably more publicness than PHE does.

To be sure, private and public often blur, either by compromises made with opponents at PHE’s inception or over time. There, too, we can identify where, when, how, and why. Increased government regulation over PHE is one major source of blurring. The partial privatization of public higher education (as with increased private cost-sharing with the government) is another. At the same time, and far less appreciated, other changes within sectors widen the distinctiveness between sectors. Examples include the abolition of tuition at public institutions, as by the Philippines’ recent populist-leftist regime or, on the PHE side, the emergence of the for-profit form.

Private-Private and Typology

A World of Private Higher Education systematically compares (a) discovered PHE reality with established public reality and (b) various manifestations of PHE to one another. Private-public and private comparisons are synergistic. Where legal for-profit private emerges alongside legal nonprofit private, as in Brazil and China, new mixes emerge within PHE as well as consequently new comparisons between for-profit PHE and public higher education. A strong tendency is that for-profit—including in its rapidly growing online or distance form—increases the already substantially divergent patterns (e.g., program offerings, part-time versus full-time student and faculty presence, and faculty power) between PHE and public institutions.

A typology of PHE has facilitated analysis of the sector’s diversification over time, evolving through empirical tracking of reality. The typology divides the private sector into subsectors of “identity,” elite, and nonelite as prelude to their subdivision into types and subtypes. Religion has been the identity subsector’s principal type, both historically and contemporaneously, sometimes with gender and ethnic parallels. Catholic affiliation has often been the first and/or primary religious subtype in many countries, while both Evangelical and Islamic religious PHE is presently making strides.

Outside the United States, world-class PHE has remained nearly absent and the private-public parity system non-existent, with South Korea the stunning exception. The much more widespread and fast-growing type of elite PHE is “semi-elite,” elite in national context but not substantially in international context. Usually quite intertwined with business, semi-elite PHE also connects to the highest levels of the job market, the professions, and, increasingly, even political power. Academically venerable religious institutions that over time subordinate their religious mission come to resemble or even shift to semi-elite status.

By enrollment count, the non-elite subsector dominates PHE. Especially in the developing world, the latter part of the twentieth century brought a huge increase in demand for higher education that governments thought themselves incapable of financing, yet socially and politically incapable of denying, thus allowing, with whatever reluctance and trepidation, massive demand-absorbing PHE. In all geographic regions, however, we have been observing a rising share of non-elite PHE in “product-oriented” PHE, a type overwhelmingly tied to the job market. It is this growth that most accounts for the current West European surge, in critics’ eyes overly substituting training for higher education, while in participants’ eyes responding to the real world as public universities are too inflexible in principle or structure to do.

Policy

The expansion of PHE has been global and there are certain patterns recognizable, with national variations. Much of what happens in one era in one region then happens in another and, within regions, in country after country. But this reality of globalization reflects no global plan. Global PHE has not been created by any self-interested or ideological movement. Neither the World Bank, nor the United States, nor any intellectual planned the PHE reality. It is doubtful that any expert predicted or imagined it well.

Nor has the global spread of PHE occurred mostly through conscious emulation country by country. Where there have been international dynamics and actors, they have not been primarily governmental. PHE’s spreading throughout Latin America in the middle of the twentieth century often happened against government will. Even when the cost considerations of mass demand made governments elsewhere more accepting of PHE, they were not the principal architects of it, though by the turn of the century global reality of PHE and the reduced stigma of the PHE idea in global consciousness were such as to facilitate Middle Eastern and Asian government partnership in fostering PHE.

For the most part, however, our World of Private Higher Education remains one built by private actors and for their own perceived self-interests. It is a world of private student and family choice, business big and small and national and international, built around single PHE institutions and chains of them, with still room for diverse religious and other nonprofit actors. It is a world largely at odds with notions that government “steering” would and should make public policy for the entirety of holistic, centrally coordinated, coherently planned, harmonious systems. A World of Private Higher Education depicts a global reality that is highly fragmented, as well as mostly privately constructed, for private interests.

Daniel C. Levy is distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Albany, Department of Educational Policy and Leadership, and director of PROPHE (Program for Research on Private Higher Education). E-mail: [email protected].

This article is based on the book A World of Private Higher Education (Levy 2024, Oxford University Press).