Current Projects
This strand of research, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), among other grants examines the causes and consequences of private higher education cross-nationally, and has developed into a rich program of research, and in the sections below three discrete lines of research are described.
There is significant variation cross-nationally in the size and service of private higher education institutions (HEIs). While there is research on country-level policies that shape variation in the role of private HEIs, not much is known about how other national and supra-national factors affect the growth of private HEIs cross-nationally. Therefore, for the past year, a team of research assistants (RAs) have conducted a systematic review of the factors shaping the growth and development of private higher education in a particular national context. The RAs have read and coded 165 peer-reviewed academic articles on the growth of private higher education (from 83 different journals). The goal of this work is to offer a conceptual framework that theorizes the factors that affect the growth of private higher education in a given national context. We are working on developing this work into a systematic review article.
This strand of research uses quantitative analysis to examine the effects of private higher education on various indicators of access, quality and inequality, including 1) national student-faculty ratios; 2) gross tertiary ratios; and 3) wealth-base inequalities.
A third line of inquiry explores how governments regulate private higher education. Our goal in this work is to better understand and theorize why, when, and how government policy towards private higher education changes, and how policies interact with other factors (i.e., historical, economic, geographic) to shape the role that private higher education plays in a given national context. This work is primarily being conducted though national case studies, including Canada, China, and the United Arab Emirates. See pictures of our fieldwork below in 2019 when we conducted interviews in Ontario, British Columbia, and three provinces in China.
Drawing on the concept of institutional positioning, we have also recently published a preliminary analysis examining how the development of the private university sector affected institutional and programmatic differentiation in Ontario.
A glimpse at our fieldwork
Below are a few photos from conference presentations and fieldwork in Ontario, British Columbia, and China.
