Levy, Daniel C. (2006) “The unanticipated explosion: Private higher education’s global surge” in Comparative Education Review v. 50, no. 2. pages 217-240
Right there on the first page of the article, in the pre-footnotes – that is, the small type face above the first footnote, Levy acknowledges multi-year Ford Foundation funding for his study on global private higher education.
Non-systematic expansion, unanticipated emergence of beaucoup higher education options in many countries.
Differentiating between state control systems and state supervisory systems in comparative education literature – page 221: “State control systems display centralization, a prior government planning, strong government controls, and imposed standardization across institutions. State supervisory systems move away from each of these characteristics and instead display significant institutional autonomy and inter-institutional differentiation.. But even in the state supervisory model, the state remains at the governance core, steering the system.”
Levy’s notion of privatization, and its explosion, sees private efforts blasting through any state control system, and even moving well beyond a state supervisor system into a more open realm of “pluralist initiative from below,” a shift toward market mechanisms.
Massification – metastasized enrollments in public universities that lead to decline in quality, and attendant follow-on issues.
“First wave” growth of private higher education – usually church-run institutions;
“Second wave” - due to massification of public higher education, and perceptions of reduced quality that led to private efforts;
“Third wave” of growth in private higher education – taking up the excess demand for higher education that even massified institutions cannot handle. “Demand-absorbing growth”
In the case of Kenya (one of the 40- countries he claims to have “studied” for this article), the three waves hardly are discernible one from the other in a timeline sense. As 7-3-2-3 shifted to 8-4-4 in the mid-1980s, the government opened several new state universities – to avoid massification of Nairobi. Still, new demand from secondary school leavers under the new 8-4-4 had, by the late 1980s, increased demand. Religious schools are what have resulted – 15 of 16 private universities with some measure of state regulatory recognition as universities are church-connected.
Levy says, page 224, that “third wave” growth characterizes much of the expansion of the last twenty years or so. Again, hardly a discernible interpretation for Kenya.
p. 230 - the rise of private higher education in sub-Saharan Africa tied to strategic adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s, reductions in government spending.
