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The purpose of this paper is to determine the perspectives of increase of effectiveness of university education, related to the use of private educational resources.

In order to determine the dependence of effectiveness of university education on the use of private educational resources, this work uses the instrumentarium of economic analysis – in particular, the method of correlation analysis – for finding the value of the coefficient of correlation and regression analysis for compiling the model of paired linear regression. Using them, the authors determine the dependence of the quality of human resources in the country on the number of private organizations with their own educational resources and on the volume of private investments in education on the basis of the 2010-2014 data. In order to ensure comprehensiveness of research, it was conducted following the example of various countries – USA, India, France, Germany, and Russia.

The authors define the notion and determine the specifics of private educational resources, study their structure and sources, and substantiate the increase of effectiveness of university education as a result of the use of private educational resources with the help of economic and mathematical instrumentarium.

Practical significance of the research consists in the fact that proprietary conclusions, related to the use of private educational resources, are recommended for use in modern universities for increase of effectiveness of the system of university education.

The theoretical value of the conducted research is determined by its contribution to the development of the concept of human resources, through substantiation of necessity for use of new methods of their formation by means of use of private educational resources in the system of university education, as well as by its development of the concept of economic effectiveness, through determination of a new factor of effectiveness of university education – the use of private educational resources.

This paper is a historical review of the development of private primary and secondary education in Hong Kong from 1841-2012. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolving relationship between the state and private schools in Hong Kong.

This paper utilizes sources from published official documents, public data available on government websites, archival documents and newspapers. The authors also carried out a few individual interviews with legislators, government officials and principals who were familiar with the history of private education in Hong Kong.

The colonial Hong Kong Government adopted laissez-faire policy in greater part of its rule until 1970s. The year 1978 marked the period of “state control” until the 1990s when privatization and deregulation emerged as a world trend in the governance of education. The role of government changed to that of “supervision” instead of “control.” Further, it is shown that the change of sovereignty did not avert the trend of decentralization, deregulation and privatization in education which is entrenched in the management of public affairs in human societies.

The findings provides an illuminating look into the development of a society and how it grapples with the fundamental questions of the degree of social control and proper use of political power in a colonial setting.

This paper aims to make a contribution to the current lack of literature in the Australian context by reviewing qualitative feedback collected from students in five private higher education institutions. In particular, the paper seeks to examine factors influencing student choice to study at private higher education institutions and student perceptions of such institutions. Previous studies on this topic are mostly focussed on universities with lack of research with the booming private higher education sector.

This study draws data from five different private for-profit higher education institutions in Australia. It involved feedback from 120 students undertaking higher education courses in different discipline areas at different stages of study. The study involved 15 focus group interviews with eight students in a group. The selection of students was based on the representation of different characteristics of student such as: male/female, domestic/international, and discipline areas.

An analysis of the data collected from the students across these five institutions indicated that the main factors influencing student choice can be grouped in six domains. These are: student perception; access and opportunity; learning environments; quality of teachers; course design; and graduate success. This study reinforces that student perception of the private for-profit higher education institutions is an important factor in influencing student choice to study at the institution.

The limitation of the study was the ability to interview more students from larger colleges, across all discipline areas. However, the time and length of the focus group interviews was largely managed by the five institutions.

The private higher education sector has experienced consistent growth in the last few years in Australia. Currently, there is no qualitative research done in Australian private higher education on factors influencing student choice to study with private institutions. The rise of such providers require research on insights about student choice, student expectation and their experience.

This paper aims to understand the differing impacts of wealth distribution on human capital accumulation and skilled-unskilled labour generation under three educational paradigms as follows: private, public and a system of mixed education.

The authors use an overlapping generations model.

The wealth dynamics show that both in the private education system and public education system, there are two possible outcomes- stagnation and steady growth depending on the efficiency of the education system, skill premium and other parameters. The choice of the education system through voting is discussed. It is found that skilled workers would always vote for private education whilst unskilled workers vote for private education if public education expenditure of the economy is low.

The study is subject to several limitations. This paper considers the rate of interest and wage rate to be exogenously given, and thus ignores the general equilibrium effects. The authors do not consider the labour-leisure choice. The introduction of labour leisure choice in the model would alter many of the results. The authors do not consider heterogeneous ability across individuals. The analysis of the differential efficiency of the different education systems needs further, rigorous research. Also, this paper does not consider other occupations such as entrepreneurship and self-employment. This paper considers the labour demand function to be perfectly elastic, and hence, does not consider any demand constraint. What happens if bequests are taxed? What happens if parents are not altruistic? These questions may be addressed in future research.

If the proportion of tax paying skilled labour is low in any country, pure public education may not be able to generate sustained human capital growth. For countries with a sufficiently large proportion of skilled labour, the public education system would be successful. On the other hand, if skill premium is low or the education system is poorly managed private education system may fail too.

Whilst investigating the effects of public vs private education on growth and development in the presence of unequal wealth distribution, The authors have tried to address a few questions. First, why the public education system has been successful in skill accumulation in developed countries whilst it has failed to do so in less developed countries? Second, why do some countries with mostly privately run educational institutions perform much better in human capital production whilst others do not? Third, in an economy with unequal wealth distribution, what are the factors that result in public or private education as a voting equilibrium outcome?

It is considered a mystery by many people that, despite charging significantly higher fees when compared to public institutions, research has shown an increase in the demand and enrolments at private higher education institutions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the critical factors considered by students when deciding to make private higher education institutions their institution of choice.

The study uses a case study approach and draws data from all the six private higher education institutions in Zimbabwe. Self-administered questionnaires were given to students representing at least 5 per cent of the student enrolment and representing all gender, study disciplines and levels of study from each university.

Irrespective of gender, six main factors influencing student choice were identified to be, in order of priority: access and opportunity; promotional information and marketing; reference or influence by others; quality of teaching and learning; fees and cost structure, and finally academic reputation and recognition.

The research was focused on a case study of Zimbabwe.

The study has implications on the way private higher education institutions market, manage and sustain the quality of educational provision. The study therefore provides private institutions with useful and practical insights on what students want in their institution of choice. This will assist these institutions in strategising in order to sustain or gain competitive advantage and to maximise on the increasing demand for private education. Implications to government and public institutions are also given.

The study recognises the critical role played by private universities in improving access and recommends African Governments who face financial and resource constraints to fund and expand public universities to encourage private higher education as a meaningful and viable way to improve access and provide higher education opportunities to potential students.

The study contributes to the current dearth of literature on factors influencing student choice to study with private institutions.

Over the past decades, there has been an intensifying movement to privatize education in Western nations, with equal concern about the quality of education for all. This article adds to a global understanding of school inspections as a governance mechanism to promote educational quality in an entirely open K-12 educational marketplace.

The role of school inspections as a quality assurance device is examined from a market accountability perspective. The Emirate of Dubai is used as an illustrative example of market accountability, where the educational landscape constitutes primarily a private open market.

Dubai proves that market accountability can address the needs of all families, assuring the provision of a sufficient quality standard of education, while allowing for competition to drive improvement. There are two lessons that Dubai offers a global audience that has been debating the merits of privatizing education: a fully free unregulated market does not promote an education system that provides a minimum standard of education for all; and a private education system can address stakeholder concerns and operate successfully in parallel to a public sector.

The idiosyncratic United Arab Emirates (UAE) education sector calls for a balance between flexibility and quality assurance across semi-independent jurisdictions. Hosting a majority of non-Emirati resident families, Dubai has developed a public inspection system for a private education market for quality assurance across 17 curricula offered in 215 private schools with diverse profit models. That most Dubai school-aged children are in private schools demanded accommodating an atypical landscape for K-12 education that affords insights into how a free market can operate. The authors encourage future research that may build a more comprehensive framework for better understanding the public–private education debate.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the affordability of private tertiary education for households in Malaysia.

The relevant literature is reviewed to provide an overview of the affordability of private tertiary education. Data are obtained randomly from a private university in Malaysia and the results are analyzed using the one‐sample t‐test and one‐way ANOVA.

The proxy of affordability, which is the average household income, reveals the per capita average is more than three times the national average, which points out the non‐affordability of students from low and average earning households to afford private tertiary education in Malaysia. Financial assistance of students at the tertiary level is insufficient and may warrant further policy and administrative improvements to reach deserving students. There is also difference in income and hence affordability between urban‐rural households, a perspective that demands changes in the current income distribution policies. In order to address the issues highlighted in this study, salient suggestions have been proposed.

This paper reinforces the need to address the issue of affordability of tertiary education and its significant importance, especially to developing countries.

The paper aims to identify the emerging themes on the challenges faced by the Malaysian private higher learning institutions (HLIs) in the provision of providing quality education.

Semi-structured interviews were purposively conducted with 29 of the Malaysian private HLI internal and external stakeholders ranging from the relevant personnel of the institutions (the quality director, administrators and senior academics), regulatory agencies, prospective employer, students and parents. Thematic analysis was then applied to analyze the participants’ responses in determining and clarifying the challenges faced by the Malaysian private HLIs in the issue of providing quality education.

Eight overarching themes were identified, namely, Academics, Facilities, Students, Programs and curriculum, Competition, Accreditation, Finance and Research. Academics represent the most frequent challenge raised by the participants, whereas Research emerged as the least mentioned challenge during the interview sessions.

The present paper focused solely on Malaysian private HLIs, and thus, the findings may not be applicable to the foreign private HLIs that are operating in Malaysia as well as to the public HLIs.

The findings are expected to provide valuable guidelines to the Malaysian Private HLIs in areas where resources need to be critically disbursed. To the regulatory agencies and policy-makers, the findings could enlighten them on the difficulties faced by these privately funded institutions so that further policies can be designed and implemented to assist these institutions in their operations and long-term survival.

This study aims to examine managerial behaviour and corporate social responsibilities of private education providers at the primary education level with a view to establishing the fact that it is indeed the obligatory adoption of ethical policies and socially responsible behaviour that accounts for the positive impact some private education operators have made in the educational sector. The study also examines the areas where the private education providers have not been accountable in their business models, decision-making and operations and thus suggests ways that the private education providers can collaborate with other stakeholders to bring about transformation and better educational outcomes.

The positive image of the corporate, social and environmental performance of any organisation to a very large extent is critical to the success of the organization. To underscore the need for managers to be more responsive to the effect their business policies and operations have on the society, this study examined the managerial behaviour and corporate social responsibility (CSR) of private education providers in Nigeria, especially at the primary level – the foundation of the educational system all over the world. The study adopted a mixed method for data collection, involving a survey and focus group discussion. Simple random sampling and purposive sampling were used, respectively, to select the final sample size of respondents made up of stakeholders of private schools – parents, teachers, school proprietors and officials of the Ministry of Education. The multiple regression procedure on Statistical Package for Social Sciences, version 20 was used to analyse data from the survey, whereas ethnographic content analysis was used to analyse data from focus group discussion. While it is evident that most parents and guardian in the global community are choosing the private schools over the public schools because of their perceived accountability or social responsibility that ensures academic success, findings from the study of private schools, especially in the developing countries show that some private education providers fall short in responsible managerial behaviour and corporate responsibility. Socially responsible managerial behaviour has been found to be a deliberate choice which business-savvy managers make and use to gain competitive advantage and secure their businesses.

Based on the hypothesis testing, the calculated value of the independent variable on the dependent variable is significant because the probability is less than 0.05 (p < 0.05). The variables under consideration – the obligation to deliver quality education (independent variable) correlated significantly with the dependent variable, the establishment of private schools. Thus, the finding shows that the obligation to deliver quality education and services led to the establishment of private schools. Also, results from the focus group discussion show that the motivation for establishing a school for some private school operators is basically borne out of the need to make a positive impact on society by bringing about positive changes in the educational system.

A major limitation of the study is the dearth of literature in this area of study – corporate social responsibility in private school. There is a dearth of research in this area because of the perception that private schools or educational entrepreneurs are exploitative (Mars and Ginter, 2012; Paul, 2012). Hence, the study adopted an exploratory approach.

The practical implication of the study borders on the need for private school managers and operators to collaborate with stakeholder groups – parents, teachers, the government and its regulatory body – the Ministry of Education for better educational outcomes.

The social implication of the study is the need for managers and operators of private schools to deliver cost-effective education so that it can be fairly accessible to a higher percentage of the populace of pupils rather than just a privileged few. This will go a long a to reducing the social inequality among pupils, as a greater population of pupils in Nigeria and many other developing countries are in dilapidated public schools where little or no teaching and learning activities take place.

This study makes an original contribution to the literature on managerial behaviour and CSR as a strategy for making a positive impact on the stakeholders of an organization/institution as the case may be, increasing business performance and having a competitive advantage. Managerial behaviour and CSR in educational institutions, especially private educational institutions is an area that is scarcely studied and thus, there is a dearth of literature in this area (Mars and Ginter, 2012; Paul, 2012). The present study focuses on managerial behaviour of private primary education providers and operators and this because all over the world, the primary education is the basic and the most vulnerable of all the levels in the educational system.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a hierarchical model to rank the challenges faced by the private Malaysian higher education institutions (HEIs) in the provision of quality education and subsequently their corresponding critical success factors (CSFs) to address those challenges.

A sequential mix method was adopted in this study. Semi-structured interviews with 29 participants were initially conducted to identify the challenges and CSFs. This was followed by a questionnaire survey involving 158 respondents to prioritise the identified findings. Thematic analysis was conducted in the qualitative stage, uncovering the challenges and their corresponding CSFs. Data for both stages were accumulated from internal and external stakeholders of Malaysian private HEIs. Finally, the four stages of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) were applied to rank the challenges and CSFs.

The qualitative stage identified eight challenges, i.e. “academics”, “facilities”, “students”, “programmes and curriculum”, “competition”, “accreditation”, “finance” and “research” together with their corresponding CSFs. The AHP enables the ranking of these challenges. “Finance” has been found to be the most crucial challenge and “high competency in managing the institution’s finance” as the most important CSF to address this challenge.

As the study restricted its focus on Malaysian private HEIs, the results may not be generalised for public HEIs and foreign private HEIs operating in Malaysia.

The hierarchical model developed in this study is deemed important for implementation to resolve the prioritised challenges. It spells out the specific areas in which the resources of Malaysian private HEIs need to be prudently disbursed and properly managed.