ABSTRACT
More than one in three university-level students studies in a private institution worldwide, with countries including Brazil, Chile, US, and Japan having a long history of private higher education (PHE) (Bjarnason et al., 2009; Macfarlane, 2011; McCowan, 2007). In both developed and developing countries, the expansion and diversification of higher education has become a strategy to facilitate competition and cater for burgeoning student demand in a globalized knowledge economy (Levy, 2006). PHE has expanded as a response to the capacity challenge in many developing countries, where constraints about public expenditures restrict the expansion of public provision (Levy, 2003; Tierney and Hentschke, 2007; Varghese, 2004; World Bank, 2009). In many regions, PHE outstrips public provision for higher education. For example, in 2010, sub-Saharan Africa had approximately 650 universities of which 200 were public and 450 were private (Morley et al., 2010). Thaver (2004, p. 70) argued that the growth of PHE in African countries was the result of four main factors: social demand for higher education, fiscal constraints, needs of specific groups in society (e.g., religion), and the influence of market ideology on higher education, that is, the application of the economic theory of the market in the provision of higher education (Brown, 2011). The World Bank (2009, p. xxii) recommended:
Arguably, private universities, technical institutes, non-resident community colleges, and distance learning programs could offer financially viable avenues for continued enrolment expansion, while public institutions go through a period of consolidation that concentrates on boosting quality, reinvigorating research, and solidifying graduate programs.
