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This chapter relies on comparative case analysis to examine how and why particular social entrepreneurs in a higher Asian middle income economy broke new grounds in private higher education. The study provides arguments as to why these private higher education entrepreneurs, when viewed inclusively, are social entrepreneurs. Findings from the study suggest that social entrepreneurs distinctively used prior insights from their working experiences to harness the financial power of local capital to fund the scaling up of their social ventures while simultaneously engaging with the country’s economic and social challenges.

China has witnessed the emergence and rapid development of private higher education in the past three decades. As private higher education gradually takes on a more significant role in the Chinese educational system, due to the inability of the government to accommodate the growing demand for higher education, educational reform, influenced by the success of private higher education, will inevitably affect the quality and quantity of education overall.

This chapter focuses on several aspects of this development: the growth of private higher education in China, issues of finance and access, its relationship to the national system and to government policy, issues of ownership and the autonomy of private higher education, as well as the advantages and challenges of Chinese private higher education and the larger significance of its emergence in China. This study concludes that with proper management private colleges and universities will benefit from and contribute to Chinese society through multiple roles and responsibilities at their mature stage.

This paper focuses on the analysis of how mass inclusion has taken place primarily in the private higher education sector. I present data on the evolution of Brazilian higher education, indicating the complementary roles undertaken by public and private sectors and their effects on the present configuration of our higher education. Then, I discuss the increase in higher education enrollment, in view of two factors: the widening of the supply and demand base – the former specifically by means of the expansion of for-profit private sector – and the adoption of mechanisms for access and commitment to higher education by public financing for students in private institutions.

In the past couple of decades, higher education systems have been in transition in sub-Saharan Africa. The phenomenal growth of private, for-profit higher education institutions is almost universal. The global trends in higher education have affected the universities in sub-Saharan Africa as well. This chapter critically examines the rapid growth of private universities as a result of globalization and its impact on society. Although the research covers only Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa, the findings have broad implications for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa (Jokivirta, 2006). The chapter is divided into four major parts, namely globalization and the knowledge economy; the evolution of private higher education in the region, using two of the oldest universities as examples; the growth of private universities and the challenges facing them; and the linkages between foreign institutions and local ones. The empirical research on which this chapter is based is part of a longitudinal study, 2001–2006, of higher education in sub-Saharan Africa.

The six member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have witnessed a significant jump in the quality of education since only the 1970s—becoming sovereign because of boom in oil resources and petrodollar prevalence—to the extent that the level of their higher education system nearly fulfills all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) standards. Among successful criteria undertaken by the most GCC universities are establishing partnerships with other foreign universities in developed countries and following international organizations’, such as UNESCO and the World Bank, recommendations by focusing on establishing knowledge economies in line with globalization. Looking into the GCC success stories, the focus of this research paper is Egypt, after the country’s last revolution on January 25, 2011. The Arab Republic of Egypt has a strategic location worldwide, is a vital peace keeper, especially in the Middle East and the Arab region, and has a rich oriental heritage: cultural, social, and traditional, in addition to its unique pharaonic history. Suggested selection of some tools of assessment would be elaborated in the Methodology section to assess the quality of national tertiary education. This chapter aimed at generally highlighting some aspects of evolution of national post-secondary system during the last two decades in an effort to come up with findings and recommendations to promote country’s higher education system. As in many other developing countries, in Egypt the university constitutes a social and political hope, and is one of the pillars of social mobility and economic development for the country. However, professional endeavors are repeatedly turned down in finding a suitable job or at least entering the labor market, resulting in a rise in unemployment rate. This is due to, on the one hand, the nature of the labor market, hence the fact that the supply of graduates exceeds the market demand for them, and on the other hand, the negatively affected quality of higher education, especially in the public sector, mainly being overloaded, which produces weak qualified potential employees. This—among other factors—contributes to the downfall of country’s economy. Many who graduate from a stronger private system encounter difficulties in either being classified as overqualified, and hence get refused and are unemployed, or are placed in a position that under evaluates their capabilities, and hence with time lose enthusiasm or escape (brain drain). In conclusion, conducting a comparison between Egypt’s private and public universities, as expected beforehand, would be in favor of the former because of having better facilities and qualified faculty, earning higher salaries, in addition to the use of advanced equipment and technology in academic research. Therefore, this research intended to expand in future the comparison to include other countries from the Middle East and North Africa region—similar to Egypt in its economic and social compositions—for mutual benefits of learning from the best practices and successful models.

This chapter explores how neoliberal higher education reforms in the United Republic of Tanzania (URT) during the 1990s and 2000s were shaped by the history of governance, schooling, and foreign donor involvement in the country following its independence in 1961. Against this backdrop, I examine how concepts of private versus public leadership, individualism, competition, and education’s place in the overall development scheme shifted over time, and the influence these changing conceptualizations had on the role of universities in Tanzania by the end of the first decade of the 21st century. In an international environment in which powerful funding agencies see neoliberal higher education policies and “knowledge societies” as the key to increased national competitiveness and poverty eradication in sub-Saharan Africa, this chapter shows how changes embedded in recent market-centered university reforms – in which the state is said to “steer” rather than “row” – have influenced the quest for equitable development.

During the 20th century, the United States rapidly developed its research capacity by fostering a broad base of institutions of higher education led by a small core of highly productive research universities. By the latter half of the century, scientists in a greatly expanded number of universities across the United States published the largest annual number of scholarly publications in STEM+ fields from one nation. This expansion was not a product of some science and higher education centralized plan, rather it flowed from the rise of mass tertiary education in this nation. Despite this unprecedented productivity, some scholars suggested that universities would cease to lead American scientific research. This chapter investigates the ways that the United States’ system of higher education underpinned American science into the 21st century.

The authors present a historical and sociological case study of the development of the United States’ system of higher education and its associated research capacity. The historical and sociological context informs our analysis of data from the SPHERE team dataset, which was compiled from the Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database.

We argue that American research capacity is a function of the United States’ broad base of thousands of public and broadly accessible institutions of higher education plus its smaller, elite sector of “super” research universities; and that the former serve to culturally support the later. Unlike previous research, we find that American higher education is not decreasing its contributions to the nation’s production of STEM+ scholarship.

The chapter provides empirical analyses, which support previous sociological theory about mass higher education and super research universities.

This chapter explores the policy changes which occurred in English higher education since 2011 which resulted in new or private higher education (PHE) providers engaging in the sector with the same regulatory requirements as established institutions (the ‘level playing field’). This chapter begins by exploring some challenges in defining and understanding PHE in England and the United Kingdom and presents some international literature to frame the English sector against PHE developments in other countries, suggesting that England’s PHE sector is distinct from international examples as it did not emerge due to an inability on the part of the incumbent sector to provide sufficient diversity of opportunity to study in England, instead emerging through a perceived need for greater competition and efficiency in the sector. The policy development of the level playing field is outlined through a review of key policy statements and reviews. A review of a sample of Access and Participation Plans submitted by PHE providers in England is used to provide some contextual data around some of the challenges presented for small, specialist PHE providers engaging with and enacting national-level widening participation (WP) policy in England. Such challenges typically include small data sets which hamper thorough analysis of interventions, under-developed information technology (IT) and record systems, and a lack of specialist expertise. These findings provide some challenge to the idea that PHE or alternative providers are inherently good at recruiting and teaching WP students as many institutions appear to have limited capacity for the data analysis and evaluation required by the Office for Students (OfS) to support such claims.

Analyzing educational evaluation not only implies investigating its goals, methods, and dimensions, but also studying the rationale behind it. The present contribution relates this rationale to the interests and the goals set by the agents involved in the formulation and implementation of educational evaluation. When it comes to the evaluation of higher education in Brazil, the specific topic of this chapter, those agents are not restricted to the scope of public departments and boards of education; also included are national and international companies as well as inter- and supranational organizations that directly or indirectly set up quality and efficiency standards for educational processes. Particularly, the rationale and the goals of the higher education evaluation models developed in Brazil from the 1970s up to the present will be focused on, highlighting the close relationship between educational assessment and educational regulation.

The aim of the chapter is to investigate the changing structural position of post-secondary schools in Poland, seen from the perspective of the expansion of higher education from one side and the current reform of vocational education from the other. Do post-secondary schools enhance opportunities for those who might not otherwise consider further education, especially when we consider lower cost, open admissions and greater accessibility in comparison with higher education institutions? Or do they play a role of a ‘discounted’ and ‘undervalued’ education for those who could not manage to enter three-year-bachelor cycles in tertiary education and thus were forced to lower their initial educational aspirations? The opening up of higher education to new student populations was done by the rapid expansion of the private (paid for) sector and the fee-paying courses in the public sector. Liberal educational policy not only opened an opportunity for the privatization in higher education, but also expanded the market-driven provision at the post-secondary level. The discussion on the relevance of post-secondary vocational qualifications must be seen within the context of the continual inflation of diplomas/degrees and the unemployment of graduates after finishing higher education. Since 2010, there has been a reverse process initiated at the governmental level in Poland: reform schemes to increase the participation of young people in vocational education and training. However, the structural position and functions of post-secondary schools, as well as their role in the employability of young people, are not subject to any open discussion at the political level. This sort of status quo concerning post-secondary institutions means that their institutional identity issues are resolved and their structural position defined predominantly by market forces.