Benjamin W.A. Jongbloed

Marketisation in Higher Education, Clark's Triangle and the Essential Ingredients of Markets

While government intervention in the higher education market may be justified, it may come at the cost of lower consumer sovereignty and restricted producer autonomy. Through marketisation policy, students and higher education providers have more room to make their own trade-offs and interact more closely on the basis of reliable information. This article discusses eight conditions for a market and the extent to which these are met in Dutch higher education. It is argued that there is still a key role for the government to co-design framework conditions and facilitate interaction in a more demand-driven and liberalised higher education sector.

Lifelong Learning: Implications for Institutions.

Lifelong learning poses a large number ofthreats and opportunities for the traditionalhigher education institutions. Not justprogramme offerings and means of delivery willhave to be restructured, but, morefundamentally, universities and colleges willhave to rethink and reshape their businessconcept, that is: their way of creating valueand maintaining their competitive edge overother providers in the education system.It will be argued that a business concept thatis based on the idea of creating value throughenhancing differentiation requires highereducation providers to move as much as they canto a student-centered provision of educationand training. This has far-reachingconsequences for the curriculum, the concept ofresearch, the interaction with students, andthe relationships with other institutions inthe education system. It may very well lead toan education system in which there is room forsome universities to transform themselves intodual-sector institutions, that contain both ahigher education part and a vocational part.

Changing Models and Patterns of Higher Education Funding: Some Empirical Evidence

Although the role of universities in the knowledge society is increasingly significant, there remains a severe lack of systematic quantitative evidence at the micro-level, with virtually all policy discussion based on country level statistics or case studies. This book redresses the balance by examining original data from universities in six European countries – Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

Reform of Higher Education in Europe

Nowhere today is higher education undergoing more substantial change than in Europe. As countries pursue policies designed to integrate their economies, political systems and social structures, it is becoming increasingly clear that higher education, research and innovation are critical components to fully realising the potential gains stemming from the changes ahead. This very idea has been espoused in several highlevel European wide processes and has given rise to a series of ambitious goals and objectives designed to ensure long term European pre-eminence as both a knowledge producer and transmitter. European higher education systems have shown themselves to be no stranger to political reform: for the better part of three decades the sector has been included in the much broader national and international–even global–reforms in Western and Eastern Europe. In order to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of our Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, former and current CHEPS staff have written the chapters of this book analysing and reflecting on issues of reform in European higher education. This introduction provides a brief overview of some of the major issues at stake in European higher education and introduces the contributions to this book.

From the Eye of the Storm

In order to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary - the third lustrum - of our Center, we at CHEPS decided to collectively write a book on the issue of how higher education institutions deal with the demand for change. Institutional change is without any doubt one of the burning issues for researchers in higher education and policy studies in general, but even more so for administrators at the institutional level (institutional leadership, deans) and planners of higher education in public life (government agencies, intermediary organisations, international organisations). Whereas the lustrumbook we wrote for our second lustrum concentrated on comparative policy studies, many of them focusing on comparisons between different national higher education systems, this time the object of our analyses is the institution itself. Todays higher education institutions are faced by demands from a multitude of actors - from inside the institution (students, staff) as well as from the institutions environment (governments, employers, research councils, sponsors). These demands require changes in policy, practice, systems, and culture. The ways in which institutions respond to these demands and how their behaviour may be understood and predicted is the challenge tackled by the authors of this volume, each from their own perspective and each looking at different aspects of the educational organisation.

Do spin-offs make the academics’ heads spin?:The impacts of spin-off companies on their parent research organisation

As public research organisations are increasingly driven by their national and regional governments to engage in knowledge transfer, they have started to support the creation of companies. These research based spin-off companies (RBSOs) often keep contacts with the research institutes they originate from. In this paper we present the results of a study of four research institutes within two universities and two non-university public research organisations (PROs) in the Netherlands. We show that research organisations have distinct motivations to support the creation of spin-off companies. In terms of resources RBSOs contribute, mostly in a modest way, to research activities by providing information, equipment and monetary resources. In particular, RBSOs are helpful for researchers competing for research grants that demand participation of industry. Furthermore, RBSOs may be seen as a proactive response by Dutch public research organisations to demands of economic relevance from their institutional environment. RBSOs enhance the prestige of their parent organisations and create legitimacy for public funds invested in PROs. At the same time, most RBSOs do not have a significant impact on the direction of the research conducted at the PROs.

Between good intentions and urgent stakeholder pressures: institutionalizing the universities' third mission in the Swedish context

There is a widespread recognition across Europe, amongst policy-makers, university managers and scholars, that universities’ societal roles (the ‘third mission’) are increasingly important. As universities become increasingly strategically managed, it is perhaps unsurprising that attention has turned towards the strategic management of this third mission. Universities risk becoming ‘overloaded’ with these missions and are forced to choose to dilute their strategic focus or only focus on a limited number of these missions. The third mission risks being regarded as a desirable but not an essential duty and therefore is unlikely to be an institutional focus.In this paper we therefore ask how can the third mission be meaningfully institutionalized given the pressures on university managers to focus on other areas. We explore this with reference to a detailed case study of a provincial Swedish university, Sjöstad University, with a long-standing commitment to creating a societal impact. We explore how Sjöstad University has created an impact, and then the tensions this raises for key university stakeholders, internally and with external partners. We then reflect on the institutionalization of the third mission and call for further consideration of how external stakeholders can provide universities with a strategic space to institutionalize the third mission.

A Cross-National Comparison of Higher Education Markets in Western Europe

In my contribution I want to mark the contours of a new governance concept in the European higher education context. It concerns the notion of ‘market governance’ that refers to the use of the market mechanism of supply and demand in governance processes. In this governance mode, government interventions are focused on the shaping of a level playing field. While government intervention in the higher education market may be justified, it may come at the cost of lower consumer sovereignty and restricted producer autonomy. Through marketisation policy, students and higher education providers have more room to make their own trade-offs and interact more closely on the basis of reliable information. This contribution will present an analytical frame, which is based on eight conditions for perfect markets, to assess to what extent market governance has become a reality in contemporary European higher education. The analytical part concerns a cross-national comparison of eight European countries. It will be argued that there is still a key role for the government to co-design framework conditions and facilitate interaction in a more demand-driven higher education sector.

The funding of research in higher education: mixed models and mixed results

This chapter will look into the question of how governments have organized the public funding of research and how that funding has changed in recent years. To make their national economies more knowledge driven, innovative and competitive, many governments have introduced reforms in their national research system. This is the case in Europe — the prime focus of this chapter — as well as in the rest of the world.

Dropout and completion in higher education in Europe: main report

Improving completion and reducing dropout in higher education are key concerns for higher education in Europe. This study on dropout and completion in higher education in Europe demonstrates that national governments and higher education institutions use three different study success objectives: completion, time-to-degree and retention. To address these objectives policy makers at national and institutional level apply various policy instruments. These can be categorized under three main policy headings: financial incentives; information and support for students; and organizational issues. The evidence indicates that countries that have more explicit study success objectives, targets and policies are likely to be more successful. Particularly if the policy approach is comprehensive and consistent. As such, it is important that study success is an issue in the information provision to (prospective) students, in financial incentives for students and institutions, in quality assurance, and in the education pathways offered to students. Furthermore, increasing the responsibility of higher education institutions for study success, for example in the area of selecting, matching, tracking, counselling, mentoring and integrating students in academic life is clearly effective. Finally, to support the policy debate and monitoring of study success evidence, there is a need for more systematic international comparative data and thorough analysis of the effectiveness of study success policies