Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of...

This paper examines whether the expansion of higher education has reduced inequality by providing more opportunities for students from less privileged backgrounds to attend university or further entrenched existing inequalities. Drawing on Maximally Maintained Inequality theory and Relative Risk...

According to the 1911 Census, the proportion female of those receiving university education was around 22%, growing to 29% in 1921. By 1952 it had dropped to under 20%, due to easy access into universities for returning war-veterans. From the early 1950s, the university-educated gender gap began...

We examine whether the (research) quality of a country’s higher education system drives macro-flows of foreign tertiary students in Europe. We use various measures on the quality of a country’s higher education system in an extended gravity model. We find that quality has a positive and...

This chapter compares and contrasts international experience with respect to higher education financing. The size and payment forms of tuition, and the different types and levels of public sector support, are illustrated for a large number of countries. A major aspect of the discussion concerns...

Currently there are significant challenges for the funding of Australian higher education teaching. Since the early 1980s successive Australian governments have shown an unwillingness to maintain academic conditions through public sector funding, and there is little doubt that this trend will...

This paper examines the impact of changes to Australia’s student financing system on various hypothetical students who choose the Government’s proposed deferred payment options, HECS-HELP and FEE-HELP. The present values of their HECS repayments under the existing (2004) system are compared...

A student's future log-wage is given by the sum of a skill premium and a random personal ‘ability’ term. Students observe only a private, noisy signal of their ability, and universities can condition admission decisions on the results of noisy tests. We assume first that universities are...

Although there are exceptions, most European universities and institutions of higher education find it difficult to compete with the best universities in the Anglo-Saxon world. Despite the Bologna agreement and the ambitions of the Lisbon agenda, European universities are in need of fundamental...