ABSTRACT
The world economy is hovering around information technology and knowledge economy. This has brought a substantial awareness among the people across countries to progress under globalisation to reap the benefits of it both in economic as well as cultural and social context. Such changes is quite pertinent to increase the demand for HE and skill formation to enhance employability. This brings in a competition among students as well as HEIs to accrue the best of the knowledge and become competitive and offer courses high in demand, respectively. While the rising demand for HE and its expansion (transforming from elite-mass stage) has brought in issues related to access and choice among varieties of courses and institutions offered by largely mushrooming HEIs (private in particular), there has been a competition among the HEIs (or among countries due to changing HE policy priorities) to get featured among top ranked HEIs at national and international levels. With the existence of all such competitions, the issue which surface repetitively is the issue of financing and access in the phase of massification and therefore democratisation of HE. The chapters in the book unravel the challenges post massification of HE when there is a relative decline in public funding of HE post adoption of the neo-liberal policies encouraging privatisation of public HEIs and proliferation of private HEIs to meet the growing demand for HE.
