ABSTRACT
Economic development may of course set limits on the capacity of a nation to institute systems available to be copied, and propensities to copy may enable nations to install convergent patterns more rapidly than one would have predicted from knowledge of their level of economic development. The comparative study of national systems of higher education initiated by Burton Clark provides a rich source for testing the extent of convergence in those systems, especially in the well-documented cases of Europe. The operation of ceiling effects provides one obvious mechanism whereby educational systems may converge even when wealth continues to differentiate. Nations also vary in the degree to which their systems of educational finance are centralized, that is, the degree to which the share of educational funds contributed by local levels of government is small or large relative to the contributions by the regional level and especially by the central government.
