The political economy of higher education: preferences, inequality, and policy change

This dissertation is a contribution to the on-going debate about the political economy of higher education and its distributive consequences. It seeks to explain variation in institutional design between countries and across time, elucidate tradeoffs in policy-making, and analyze determinants of inequality in access to higher education. To this end, institutional design is conceptualized as the combination of enrolment, degree of access inequality, finance mechanisms and quality. The introductory chapter first presents this conceptualization and describes variation in system design from a comparative perspective. The following papers apply it to explanations of both policy outputs and outcomes.