ABSTRACT
212The higher education sector in many countries in Europe and elsewhere has been subject to major reforms in recent years, not least because of global and European financial crises and the perceived need to increase the efficiency of (public) investment in higher education as an economic good (Peters et al., 2015). On top of the economic rationale, the public value of higher education is now becoming an important issue in higher education reform (Broucker et al., 2016). At the same time, technological advances in data availability and data 214processing have made it increasingly possible to base decisions on and in higher education on quantitative evidence. For this possibility to become a meaningful reality, however, the complexity of the large amount of data available on different levels must be governed: how do you make sure that the data can be used optimally, on different levels, with a view to a coherent higher education policy? This chapter explains how such a Big Data governance structure can be designed for the higher education sector.
