Ricardo Biscaia

Competition and diversification in public and private higher education

The development of mass higher education and growing competition between higher education institutions has given increasing visibility to the issue of diversification. This article analyses the issue of programme diversification, using a panel of 181 Portuguese higher education institutions over the period 1995 to 2007, by comparing the behaviour of public and private institutions. The results show that the legal status of institutions is the major determinant of programme diversification, as private institutions are far more specialized than their public counterparts. The study also evaluates the role of other institutional variables, such as the institution’s size, age, location, institutional mission and research intensity, to explain differences in the diversification behaviour of higher education institutions. The results provide important insights, as competition has been thought to improve the performance of higher education institutions.

Should we start worrying? Mass higher education, skill demand and the increasingly complex landscape of young graduates’ employment

Recent decades have seen a massive expansion in higher education (HE), fuelled by high expectations about its private benefits. This has raised concerns about the impact on the employability of recent graduates and the potential mismatches between their skills and the competences required by the job structure. Equally, it could set the ground for a possible transformation of demand for graduate skills and the emergence of new employment profiles. In this article, data for Portugal for the period 2000–2010 were used to look at compositional changes in graduate employment and the incidence of three potential problems in graduates’ transition to the labour market: overeducation, overskilling and education–job mismatches. The implications of growing demand heterogeneity on increasing inequality in graduate labour markets and on the expectations supporting mass HE in a country that rapidly expanded access to tertiary education as a strategy to converge with the productivity levels of other more developed economies are discussed.

What role for private higher education in Europe? Reflecting about current patterns and future prospects

In recent decades, we have seen the emergence of private higher education in many European countries. This has been associated with the waves of significant expansion of the higher education system and with changes in regulation patterns, which have promoted a growing private-like behavior of public higher education institutions and the development of private provision in several European countries. The aim of this text is to discuss the relevance of the various dimensions of privatization in European higher education and to explore the relationship between public and private sectors in several European countries. This analysis points out some major patterns of the private higher education sector in Europe and reflects about the major issues faced by those systems regarding the potential contribution of private higher education.

Public and private higher education in Europe: competition, complementarity or worlds apart?

For the first time, data on individual European higher education institutions (rather than data aggregated at the country level) is used in order to examine a wide range of issues that are both theoretically challenging and relevant from policy-making and societal perspectives. The contributors integrate statistics on universities and colleges with other sources of information such as patents, start-up firms and bibliometric data, and employ rigorous empirical methods to address a range of key questions, including: what is the role of non-university tertiary education, such as vocational training? How important is the private sector? Are European universities internationalized? Are they efficient from the point of view of costs and educational output? Are there pure research universities in Europe? How do universities contribute to economic growth?

Higher Education, Human Capital, and Regional Dynamics in Southern Europe

Although the term “human capital” has remote historical roots, being already widespread in the writings of the founding fathers of economic analysis, it was during the second half of the twentieth century that an increasing debate around human capital emerged among scholars. The increasing relevance of human capital for economic growth was also associated with the role of technology and its impact in enhancing the demand for more and better qualified workers. However, the capacity of societies to take advantage of those investments has been found to be more complex and uncertain than it was initially portrayed. A more recent line of research started recognizing the potential role of human capital also at the regional level. In this chapter we aim at understanding the role of human capital on regional convergence for Southern Europe countries, with particular emphasis in recent empirical studies. We discuss the role of human capital in the framework of growth convergence theories and the issue of human capital migration as a potential factor influencing regional disparities in Europe. Then we focus on an important component of human capital formation—the role of higher education institutions at the regional level and we review the empirical findings on these issues in the context of Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). Finally we provide a brief exploratory analysis of the potential association between the education of the population and the GDP per capita at the regional-level for those four countries.