The idea of higher education as a public good is premised on the claim that it contributes to society as a whole across a wide variety of institutional settings. As such, it cannot be reduced to a multiplicity of private gains. It follows from this claim – which formed a central plank of the European post-WWII “settlement” and its expression in various forms of state “welfarism” – that higher education should be funded at least in part through the public purse. That claim is now highly contested and the debate on higher education and the public good is shifting significantly from the need to maintain a system of publically funded higher education towards the need to develop a system whereby the state exercises public responsibility for higher education through a variety of funding mechanisms. A major driver of this shift in emphasis has been the need to reconcile the funding of higher education with the austerity measures that have, rightly or wrongly, followed the 2007/2008 economic...
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Nixon, J. (2017). Higher Education and the Public Good. In: Shin, J., Teixeira, P. (eds) Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_15-1
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