The rise of private higher education has transformed the global higher education landscape. Despite its expansion, private higher education remains contentious, often seen as low-quality and profit-driven. Yet, private universities often fulfill key national goals, expanding access, supporting socioeconomic mobility, or offering distinctive educational models. This article calls for deeper scholarly engagement with private higher education as a lens for examining broader debates in higher education systems.

The growth of private higher education over the past four decades has transformed the global higher education landscape. Private institutions now enroll approximately one-third of all higher education students. Growth has been particularly strong in the Global South, where privatization helped fuel massification. In these countries, private universities tend to differ in important ways from their public counterparts. The modal private university globally is demand-absorbing, founded after 1990, teaching-focused, and for-profit, which often implies lower admission and academic standards.

Yet, outside of a few notable exceptions, private higher education has never been respected as being as high quality or as legitimate as public universities. Policy debates concerning private higher education often frame it as necessary but undesirable—necessary, because it provides access to higher education that the public sector cannot or will not provide, yet undesirable because it cannot be trusted. Unlike the public higher education sector, which is typically owned and operated by governments and funded in part by public revenues, the private sector is typically a tuition-dependent sector that operates with market logics. In its worst forms, it becomes a predatory consumer product. Media depictions of private higher education abound with institutions that seemingly “sell” degrees to those who are willing to pay for a credential that requires very little effort. In other cases, private universities can be outright predatory, returning a profit to investors while taking advantage of students’ aspirations for education and mobility, leaving them with a useless degree, expensive debt, or both.

In reality, most private universities operate within a grey zone, somewhere between the predatory and the public. Private universities are usually smaller than their public counterparts. They offer a narrower range of degrees. They typically have lower standards for admission. Their faculty likely have less experience and higher teaching loads. They typically return some profit to their founders. They are rarely research-intensive powerhouses or providers of elite education for the most meritorious.

Yet, private universities play a role in advancing both individual and national educational goals. They provide students with degrees and pathways for desired futures, including employment, migration, or further study. Private universities may serve as an outlet for individual preferences that the state, on behalf of a larger public, is unwilling or unable to offer. The private sector may provide a religious education to those who desire it or a small close-knit learning community for those who would not thrive in large universities. Similarly, private universities may offer novel models of pedagogy and instruction not available elsewhere. In some countries, private investment has been called upon to build the physical infrastructure of a higher education system. As long as we view private higher education as offering only second-rate education that cannot be trusted with advancing the public good, we likely miss out on a deeper understanding of the role that it plays in helping societies meet their broader goals, including economic development, individual mobility, and ideological pluralism.

Directions for the Field

The private sector has primarily been studied by those interested in the specific policies and practices of private universities. However, debates over private higher education reflect some of the most significant questions about higher education, including how much autonomy universities should have over what they teach, who should profit off students’ educational aspirations, and what quality really means. Moreover, how governments answer these questions tells us a lot about the state’s goals and the broader society it serves. Private higher education has been underappreciated as a site for exploring larger questions in a given society or at a given moment and deserves further attention.

Relatedly, as we contemplate the future of global higher education, many of the realities about private higher education that we have taken for granted for at least three decades are in flux: in contrast to its earlier expansion, in a growing number of countries where populations are shrinking, private universities are the first to close, with major consequences for faculty and staff, students and local communities. Private universities may offer insight into what is to come for the sector.

Meanwhile, the private sector is also becoming increasingly diverse, with new and different models emerging, including semi-elite, research-oriented, and transnational. In some countries, private universities are establishing their reputations, with public counterparts now acknowledging private universities as real competitors. Elite flight to private universities is occurring in some countries, as many upper-middle-class families recognize the potentially better labor market outcomes, caring campus communities, or state-of-the-art facilities that some private universities offer. While private universities’ impact on inequalities has long been a concern for the field, a broader shift in preferences would raise real concerns over the role of private universities in exacerbating inequality and potentially undermining public higher education. It deserves to be closely monitored.

Elizabeth Buckner is associate professor of higher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto, Canada, where she also holds the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Higher Education for Global Sustainable Development. E-mail: [email protected].