Public funding in higher education: past, present and future

Presenter

Dr Vincent Carpentier, Reader in History of Education at UCL Institute of Education

Introduction

Covid-19 has underlined and aggravated key issues (already raised after the 2008 crisis but left unaddressed since) about the vulnerability of socioeconomic systems to spiralling inequalities and struggling public services. Those issues have strongly challenged all activities of the social sphere. This includes key questions raised about the capacity of the contemporary trends in public funding and development of higher education systems to contribute to address the key social, economic and political and environmental problems ahead.

In this seminar, I propose to reflect on the past, present and future of public funding in higher education (HE). I do this by looking back at the evolution of level and structure of funding in HE in France, the UK, the USA and Canada since the 1920s. The analysis is based on historical data from the early 1920s onwards collected as part of a project from the Centre for Global Higher Education. I look particularly at the evolution of public funding in HE and explore its origins and consequences. I identify a shift from a rise and retreat of public funding and consider the various rationales associated to it. I then turn to the consequences of that shift (which started after the 1973 crisis and accelerated after the 2008 crisis) on HE systems, institutions, students and staff. I particularly discuss a problematic drive towards a public/private substitution in HE funding which produces tensions between expansion and funding, an increasingly unequal institutional differentiation in terms of funding, staffing and social stratification. I argue that although not sufficient, a countercyclical revival of public resources is essential to reverse the process of public private/substitution in HE funding in order to drive a reduction in the inequalities within HE systems and rebalance the rationales behind HE and ultimately contribute to wider socio-economic transformations necessary in hard times.

About the presenter

Vincent Carpentier is a Reader in History of Education at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. His comparative work on the historical relationship between educational systems, Kondratiev cycles and social change is located at the interface of history of education and political economy. His research explores the historical and contemporary connections and tensions between funding, equity and quality in HE at both national and global levels. He is a member of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). He is responsible for CGHE Project 7, ‘A historical lens on higher education staffing: UK and France’ and a Co-Investigator on Project 8, ‘Local and global public good of higher education: 10 nation study’ examining the French context. He is an Associate Editor of the London Review of Education and a member of the scientific committee of the French Network on HE Research (RESUP).