The vast global expansion of private higher education to over 80 million students, a third of total enrollment, and near ubiquity by country, has brought formidable additional differentiation and complexity within the world’s higher education undertakings and stakeholder configurations. Leading research has captured vital dimensions of this differentiation, including through private-public and private-private comparisons. In addition to the dissemination of this discovered knowledge, the further expansion of knowledge rests largely upon building directly upon the considerable advances.

When International Higher Education debuted 30 years ago, private higher education (PHE) had already leaped toward a significant minority of the rapidly expanding global higher education total enrollment, appearing in all regions. During these last 30 years, PHE’s enrollment has catapulted to over 80 million, peaking at and sustaining a one-third share of the total, and appearing in nearly all countries with 10,000 total enrollments or more. Fortunately, research is shedding increasing light on this expanded reality.

What Has Been Discovered

The astounding PHE expansion has happened overwhelmingly in low- and middle-income countries. Whereas Africa and the Arab region remain probably in takeoff stages, Asia and Latin America weigh most heavily. India alone has surged to 23 million private enrollments, compared to 5 million in the historically leading United States (now fourth behind also Brazil and China). Precisely in the last 30 years, PHE has expanded unexpectedly in Western Europe (from 1.5 million with 12 percent of total enrollment to nearly 4 million and 20 percent). Moreover, PHE continues to evolve through new structures and functions, with recent scholarship distinguishing fresh manifestations from modestly modified historical repetition.

Nor does this widespread PHE presence simply resemble public higher education. Ample resemblance is evident, including where widespread copying of public practice (for ease and legitimacy) flanks one key private characteristic (e.g., lingering religious or family ownership). Additionally, notable blurring between sectors occurs over time (e.g., tuition at public universities or regulations on PHE). But large abiding contrasts remain between the sectors regarding programs, teaching-research-service mixes, ties to business and to government, who governs, who even participates, degree of secularism, and much more. Perhaps the plainest abiding contrast lies between public higher education’s large dependence on government financing and the yet far greater PHE dependence on private financing.

All such salient private-public differences, along with the blurring of them, come into sharper empirical relief as we analyze inside each sector. In turn, the intersectoral comparisons then can illuminate private-public comparisons. For example, early evidence from the recent expansion of legally for-profit PHE shows how it makes PHE overall differ even more sharply from the public sector on matters such as program offerings. Meanwhile, the clearest gain from penetration within the private sector has been increasingly accurate profiling of the increasingly complex private sectors. We can identify “identity” institutions, mostly religious but also gender and ethnic ones, the mission challenges they encounter and the pockets of resilience that exist. Likewise, we see how and why elite institutions are rising fast, even as world-class private universities remain almost singularly an American reality. At the same time, we are making progress in distinguishing among the vast majority of PHE institutions that are academically non-elite—including distinguishing between those which are merely “demand-absorbing” and sometimes predatory, as opposed to those that attract students for their primarily job market focused programs. We also discover in what regions and subregions these non-elite types come principally in nonprofit or for-profit legal form.

How to Discover More

How can we advance further knowledge about PHE? A conventionally crafted research agenda would encompass an ample list of needs. Beyond the formidable strides governments and UNESCO have made in gathering enrollment data, governments and international agencies could gather data on many additional financial, governance, programmatic and other activity indicators. Perhaps regional agencies in developing regions could narrow the gap between their reach and that of their more developed counterparts. More social scientists should bring their disciplines’ concepts and methods to the task. More studies of PHE should adapt methods from the best studies of public higher education. Perhaps both social science and education research graduate programs could incentivize students interested in studying aspects of the too-often ignored private sector of higher education. Most such empirical studies could be carried into normative or policy terrain as well. All such steps—but also countless more—could well advance our knowledge of PHE.

In the face of such seemingly endless possible steps forward, however, we might emphasize a single scholarly norm that is far too often violated when it comes to PHE: reading before writing. As outlined above, much of importance has been discovered in the last 30 years. Basic general tendencies have been identified, along with tendencies to the exceptions. Developed conceptual categories have already been employed in different settings, facilitating comparative analysis. At least on enrollment, we have sturdy comprehensive global and regional datasets. None of this argues for mere emulation in research approaches. It does argue, however, for building from extant knowledge, understanding it, extending it when possible, criticizing, debating, and revising when warranted. Such study will never become as common as unmoored descriptive works about “PHE in country X,” but the roots in research that has built our present knowledge are already sprouting major branches. One good example is the unfolding Routledge book series, The Global Realities of Private Higher Education.

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