Inside Higher Ed: Private Colleges Proliferating, Worldwide
With the demand for higher education ever-growing and unmet internationally, the private sector continues to grow. A paper to be presented this week at the Comparative and International Education Society conference in New York explores global patterns in the growth of private higher education – how it increases access and who for, how private institutions expand, and what the worries are.
“Fewer and fewer countries disallow private higher education, whereas many did several decades back,” writes Daniel C. Levy, a professor and director of the Program for Research on Private Higher Education at the State University of New York at Albany. “Furthermore, while private growth has often exploded unexpectedly and on the fringes of legislation, it has also emerged where laws have been liberalized” – in various Indian states and Chinese provinces, for instance. Whereas private education earlier developed in Latin America outside of a “state directive,” it’s increasingly common, Levy writes, for governments in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East “to articulate a rationale for private access.” In the context of the report and international higher education, “private” can mean nonprofit, for-profit or somewhere in between.
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