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Higher Education Policies
Chapter · June 2020

DOI: 10.1332/policypress/9781529208627.003.0003
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Bristol University Press
Chapter Title: Higher Education Policies
Book Title: Contesting Higher Education

Book Subtitle: The Student Movements Against Neoliberal Universities
Book Author(s): Donatella della Porta, Lorenzo Cini and César Guzmán-Concha
Published by: Bristol University Press. (2020)
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3

Introduction
In contrast with the dominant research trend in social movement

studies, which has traditionally devoted little attention to the political
economy of contemporary societies (della Porta, 2015), the authors
contend that the effects of political-economic changes are key to better
understanding the rise, variety and decline of student mobilizations.
Transformations occurring in the institutional forms and modes of
regulation of capitalism, especially those related to state institutions
and their policies, have indeed been fundamental in setting in motion,
and shaping the formation processes of social movements (Cini
et al., 2017).
Considering this, the chapter addresses long-term and short-term
political-economic changes occurring in the field of HE related to the
recent wave of student protests. The four regions under investigation
cover different HE systems, from those where the role of the state is still
prominent (Italy and Quebec), and the commodification trend is not so
strong, to others in which the market, along with the commodification
of the sector, have acquired greater relevance over recent decades
(England and Chile). The authors maintain that the different pace and
form of the marketization process (see also Table 1.2 in Chapter 1)
have heavily affected the ways in which students mobilized in terms
of action repertoires, political goals and demands, and organizational
structures. Exploring the variety and the institutional differences in
the field of HE helps us assess the variety of the student movements
embedded in such fields.
The economic crisis of 2008 represented a decisive watershed for
further propelling the marketization process of HE, as governments
overtly pursued pro-austerity and privatization agendas in various
policy fields, including pensions, social protection, healthcare and HE.
65
CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION
Austerity measures, following the crisis, have introduced neoliberal

reforms in HE fields in countries where they previously did not
exist, and accelerated their implementation elsewhere. This process
has been characterized by one or more of the following measures:
(1) the introduction of greater competition in the provision of student
education; (2) the supplementation of public sources of funding of
universities with private sources, especially tuition fees; and (3) the
attribution of greater institutional autonomy from government steering
(see Klemenčič, 2014, pp 397–9).
Neoliberal reforms produced profound distributional consequences,
as they altered the old state/family balance in the funding of HE
by increasing the weight of families’ expenditures (tuition fees) to
compensate for a retrenchment of state funding. Even reforms whose
alleged aims are improving the administration of universities and their
management –such as performance or accountability-based incentives,
national and international rankings, and competitive grants –put
institutions in a marketplace framework, conditioning their behaviour
and decisions (Cini and Guzmán-Concha, 2017).
In addressing these issues, a historical overview of the trend of
marketization affecting the HE fields of Chile, England, Quebec
and Italy over the last 30 years is offered. We focus on two political-
economic dimensions of HE whose changes have triggered collective
responses at various levels, intensities and scales: (1) financing and
autonomy of universities; and (2) governance and managerialization.
To do this, the chapter is structured in four sections, ordered by those
regions that have experienced more intense marketization processes
(Chile and England), to those that have experienced less intense
marketization processes (Quebec and Italy). The first part of the chapter
illustrates the main transformations occurring in the HE sectors of
the four cases, as prompted by reform processes since the 1980s. The
second and final part of the chapter explores in detail the most recent
round of reforms in the four regions, which constituted the triggering
factors of the student mobilizations under investigation. We observe
that in three of the cases studied, students reacted against proposed
increases in tuition fees (Quebec, England) or their consequences
(Chile), while in one case their protests were against cutbacks and
governance reforms (Italy).
The formation of the neoliberal university in Chile

In Chile we see a case of rapid development of neoliberal reforms of
the education system during a relatively short period of time. Until
66
1973, the state had a leading role in the guidance of HE policies. In

exchange for public funding and recognition, private institutions such
as the Catholic University had to accept guidance by the state. The
changes introduced between 1967 and 1973 (the so-called ‘university
reform’) expanded the role of the state; university enrolment grew
threefold in the given period, from 55,653 to 146,451 students.
Moreover, the reform improved academic conditions, including
the expansion and professionalization of academic personnel and
the replacement of the old academic schools with the creation of
disciplinary departments and research centres, following the Anglo-
Saxon model (Fleet and Guzmán-Concha, 2017). After the coup d’état
in 1973, the government intervened in the universities by appointing
generals as rectors and expelling professors and students suspected of
links with left-wing parties. Furthermore, in the context of severe
public spending cutbacks, resources for HEIs were reduced. In 1981,
the military decided to undertake an ambitious reform programme
that, in a way, took on board the problems of disordered growth and
the need for modernization of the system that the pre-1973 ‘university
reform’ was not able to resolve. But it did so by taking inspiration from
a neoliberal, market-like conception of HE. Thus, the reforms of the
1980s put an end to more than a century of strong presence of the
state in HE (Bernasconi and Rojas, 2004).
The main reforms of the dictatorship in the 1980s consisted of
the introduction of the principle of universities’ self-funding, which
forced them to impose tuition fees, and the opening of the system
to private providers. Moreover, a separation between university and
non-university study programmes was established, which fostered
the appearance of Professional Institutes and Centres of Technical
Formation (respectively IPs and CFTs in Spanish). The regional
seats of the two state universities were transformed into 14 small
independent universities, in an attempt to challenge the strong
politicization of campuses. Each public university was given new
charters by which they were granted greater autonomy, although
their governance remained highly hierarchical and centralized in
the figures of non-elected principals and the board of directors.
Moreover, as academic personnel were no longer given the status of
public employees, universities gained latitude to establish their own
policies of remuneration.
In 1980 there were only eight tertiary education institutions, all
universities and all receiving public funding. But one decade later the
landscape was radically different. By the end of the decade, private
HEIs had proliferated. In 1991 there were a total of 302 institutions,
67
and only 22 universities received public funding. Among the 280

institutions not receiving public funding, there were 40 universities, 79
IPs and 161 CFTs. But this expansion primarily occurred from 1988
onwards, when the requirement of authorization from the Interior
Secretary was cancelled –a clear measure of the government’s political
control over HE. Given the expansion of the system, and in a last
minute attempt to further advance its basis, the dictatorship approved a
new constitutional law of education, the Ley Orgánica Constitucional de
Enseñanza (LOCE). This constitutional law regulated the three levels
of the educational system (primary, secondary and HE), establishing
minimum standards for the first two levels and the requirements for
the creation of educational institutions in all three levels. One of its
main provisions included a radical decentralization of public schools,
which were transferred to municipalities. In HE, LOCE established
a new mechanism to certify and legally recognize HEIs and study
programmes: a special agency (Consejo Superior de Educación)
was put in charge of accrediting new institutions and programmes.
Accreditation became a ruled, compulsory procedure for all new
institutions. Similarly, LOCE sanctioned that all universities must be
not-for-profit institutions –unlike IPs and CFTs, which were not
subject to this obligation.
Before the Pinochet reforms, universities received direct transfers
of state subsidies regulated by law. The 1980 constitution introduced
the concept of subsidiarity of the state in the provision of education.
With the reforms of 1981, all universities started to charge tuition fees
as a mechanism to compensate declining state subsidies. In turn, state
funds were structured in three main sources: direct fiscal contributions
(aporte fiscal directo, AFD), which were aimed exclusively at financing
the pre-1981 institutions; AFI, which was accessible to all institutions
irrespective of their nature, as vouchers with which students rewarded
their preferred educational institutions; and student loans financed by
the state and administered directly by the universities, which were
reserved for pre-1981 institutions. Finally, public-funded research
was to be channelled through a new agency (CONICYT, Comisión
Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología) which had to distribute research
grants to individual scholars under a competitive basis, irrespective of
their institutional affiliation (Bernasconi and Rojas, 2004).
The University Credit Fund (Fondo de Crédito Universitario), the
first official public loan scheme for HE, was created in 1987. According
to the original policy design, universities were expected to finance the
issue of new loans with the repayment of old ones. Therefore, state
subsidies were planned to gradually diminish over the years to finally
68
disappear in 1994, when it was expected that the system would be

consolidated. This optimistic forecast was far from being realistic. In
the first years of the 1990s, severe underfunding threatened access and
continuity of studying for many students. In 1994 the government
replaced the previous scheme with the University Credit Solidarity
Fund (Fondo Solidario de Crédito Universitario, FSCU). It assigned
more resources to this fund, reversing the declining trend that was its
main characteristic since its inception, and establishing new conditions
for repayment: loan repayment would start two years after graduation,
with debtors paying up to 5 per cent of their annual income. Moreover,
the debt would be written off in any case after 12 years. Although the
FSCU alleviated the situation for students in traditional universities,
those enrolled in the private universities, IPs and CFTs remained
excluded from any public mechanisms of financial aid.
In the decade between the 1981 Pinochet HE reform and the
re-establishment of democracy in 1990, the military transformed
the shape of HE in Chile. At the beginning of that decade, public
universities accounted for less than a third of the total enrolment in
HE. The Pinochet reforms were not reversed by the new democratic
governments, as the main trends delineated by his administration were
consolidated. The role and position of public, state-owned universities
within the HE system (HES) continued to fall despite an expansion of
enrolment in public universities over the 1990s and increases in their
budgets, which did not compensate for the losses of the 1970s and
1980s. Conversely, enrolment in private universities increased more
than fivefold in the first decade after the restoration of democracy, in
spite of the lack of public aid for these students.
The recent round of neoliberal reforms in Chile

In 2005, the centre-left administration of Ricardo Lagos created the
CAE –the state-guaranteed loan (Law 20,027). This loan was to
benefit students registered in private institutions (created after 1981).
Enrolment in private universities represented 44 per cent of the total
that year. In turn, enrolment in public institutions had declined to 26
per cent, three points less than in 2000. Overall, enrolment in private
tertiary institutions accounted for 74 per cent of total enrolment in
HE, an increment of three points in relation to 2000.
CAE loans are awarded by private banks that obtain this franchise by
a public tender organized by the INGRESA committee, which is the
public institution in charge of the assessment and allocation of these
loans, linking lenders –banks –with borrowers –students (World
69
n
Bank, 2011; Olavarría and Allende, 2013). Additional incentives

were created to ensure lower risks for the banks, as the 5.8 per cent
interest rate was not considered enough to cover fee rises. The scheme
foresaw that the state would repurchase at least 25 per cent of the loans
assigned, while also paying a surcharge of 6 per cent of the amount
invested in the loans (Kremerman and Páez, 2016). In addition, HEIs
would guarantee part of the loans taken out by their students –ranging
between 60 and 90 per cent –while students continued their studies.
The government would provide guarantees of repayment against the
risk of default, in proportions that varied from 20 per cent, while
students continued to study, to up to 90 per cent, 18 months after they
finished their programmes. The rationale to involve the banks in this
scheme was that the state was unable, due to financial restrictions, to
subsidize students enrolled in private institutions. This was recognized
by the Secretary of Education at the time of CAE’s creation.1
According to the World Bank (2011), between 2006 and 2010,
including new and renewed loans, 213,350 students from 71 HEIs
(including IPs and CFTs) benefited from this scheme. In this period,
a total of US$1.4 billion worth of loans had been given, with an
average yearly loan size of US$2,600. In relation to the costs of tuition
in HE, a study by Salas (2010) indicates that between 1999 and 2009,
universities increased their tuition by 38.3 per cent. But the intensity
of these increments varied across institutions; while private pre-1981
universities increased their tuition by 47 per cent, public universities
did so by 38 per cent on average. Interestingly, private universities
(post 1981 reform) increased their tuition fees by 21.3 per cent, well
below the system’s average.
CAE spread very rapidly, and already in 2010 it was the state
programme with the largest number of beneficiaries (216,126 students).
It accounted for the highest share of public resources; more than half
of the total financial aid for students was allocated to CAE, as seen
in Table 3.1. In contrast, the FSCU (that benefits students enrolled
in traditional pre-1981 universities only) amounted to 13.9 per cent
of the total financial aid. The remaining resources funded various
scholarship programmes2 that were created to address some of the
needs of a growing student population.
As shown in Table 3.1 loan programmes represented more than two
thirds of the public resources for financial aid in that year.
Table 3.1 also shows that the composition of public subsidies to HE has
changed. Direct fiscal contributions (AFDs) allocated only to traditional
universities (pre-1981) have shrunk, and while in 1990 they were more
than 50 per cent of the budget, in 2016 they represented little more
70
newgenrtpdf
Table 3.1: Higher-education budgets –proportions (%) by type of subsidy (1990–2016)*
1990 2005 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

1. AFD 51.2 45.6 21.5 20.4 19.1 18.4 18.3 15.2 12.2
2. Free Education Bill – – – – – – – – 29.5
3. AFI 18.2 7.27 3.1 2.9 2.4 2.1 2.0 1.8 1.4

4. Student Aid 25.7 34.3 64.6 68.1 72.5 73.3 74.0 75.3 49.7
4.1 FSCU** 25.7 22.7 13.9 12.9 7.6 6.8 6.4 5.7 0.4
4.2 Bicentenario Scholarships** – 6.7 9.3 11.9 19.3 19.3 17.0 19.4 1.9
4.3 Nuevo Milenio Scholarship** – 1.2 5.8 5.45 7.2 7.3 8.6 7.3 5.1
71
4.4 Other Scholarships** – 3.8 4.2 4.8 8.4 9.8 10.7 10.5 7.4
4.5 CAE** 0.0 0.0 31.3 33.1 29.9 30.2 31.3 32.4 34.9
4.Other subsidies 0.0 12.8 10.9 8.7 6.0 6.1 5.7 7.7 7.2
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
(Total–CAE) 100.0 100.0 68.7 66.9 70.0 69.8 68.7 67.6 65.1
(Total–CAE–FSCU) 74.3 77.3 54.8 54.1 62.4 63.1 62.3 61.9 64.7
* Public funding for research not included (FONDECYT, FONDEF and Proyectos Milenio, which are administered by the Ministry of Economy).
** Percentages calculated over the total.
Source: CENDA
than 10 per cent of the HE budget. In contrast, student aid programmes

represent by far the largest item of public spending, almost 80 per cent
(whereas they represented 27.7 per cent in 1990). While student aid
now occupies the largest share of the budget, programmes dedicated
to serving students enrolled in traditional and public universities have
instead proportionally decreased. One third of the 2016 HE budget went
to CAE subsidies, while the public loan scheme for students enrolled
in traditional universities (FSCU), which was a quarter of the budget
in 1990, represented less than 1 per cent in 2016.
When the 2016 free education bill is excluded, the fastest growing
programme over recent years is CAE. According to the National
Centre for Alternative Development (CENDA) figures, CAE subsidies
experienced real increments of 32.4 per cent in 2015 and 34.9 per
cent in 2016. Moreover, in the 2016 budget, the amount allocated to
CAE is even larger than the amount for the free education programme
(US$635,205,688 versus US$536,620,149). Overall, these figures show
that the state prefers to finance universities through student aid, rather
than through direct unrestricted subsidies.
What is more, CAE had a negative effect on enrolment in public
universities, while since its inception the number of students in private
institutions has increased. The proportion of students enrolled in state
universities was 26 per cent of the total in 2005, but if we consider
that this figure was already 29 per cent in 1990, we can conclude that
the size of public enrolment in the system was relatively stable in the
first 15 years after the end of the dictatorship. Since 2005 the decline
of enrolment in public universities accelerated; however, less than 15
per cent of students attended public universities in 2015, a drop of
10 points in ten years. In contrast, and while enrolment in private
institutions grew little since 1990 (when it represented 71 per cent of
the total), the expansion accelerated again starting in 2005. Overall,
while students enrolled in private tertiary institutions doubled between
2005 and 2015 (from 380,226 to 850,174), the number of students in
public institutions increased by a modest 4.7 per cent (from 163,039
in 2005 to 170,748 in 2015) (CNED, 2017). This occurred against a
general trend in which enrolment in tertiary education multiplied 5
times over the last 30 years, from a coverage rate of 14.4 per cent in
1990 to 55 per cent of the population aged 18–24 years old in 2014
(Menéndez, 2014). In sum, policies adopted in the early 2000s have
facilitated the meteoric expansion of the private sector within the HES.
This has occurred against the backdrop of increases in state subsidies and
student indebtedness which, eventually, benefited private universities
and the banking system, respectively.
72
The reforms initiated during the second Bachelet administration

can be seen, as a policy officer in the Secretary of Education put it,
“as the introduction of [new] hygiene standards to a mixed system in
which the private sector will continue to have a significant role, and
where the options to recover a role for the public sector [depend] on
institutional changes in the steering wheel.” (CHI 10)
The formation of the neoliberal university in England

The institutional configuration of the English HE system after
the Second World War resembled that of most Western countries.
Enrolment levels were low at about 5 per cent, access was largely limited
to the elite and students were entitled to generous subsidies covering
their living expenses. Similar to other European university systems
of the 1950s and 1960s, the English university system was therefore
deeply ‘elitist’ (Trow, 2006). To break down this model of the ‘ivory
tower’ the Robbins report (1963) recommended widening student
participation within the English HE sector. More notably, the report
identified a wealth of untapped ability in the population and argued
that as a matter of principle all applicants with appropriate qualifications
should be admitted to university. By logical extension this meant that
the system needed to undergo a massive expansion, setting a target
of 560,000 full-time students in HE by the year 1980, compared to
the status quo of 216,000 at the time the report was conceived.3 This
ambitious goal was to be reached by expanding enrolments at existing
institutions, granting university status to technological colleges as well
as colleges of education, and building six new universities.
In the early 1980s, England4 was the first European country to begin
a radical process of privatization of the public sector. Two aspects
of this process have been pursued and implemented by all British
governments since the 1980s in the HE sector: the privatization of
the channels of public funding, the political aim of which was to
pass from a state-led system to a regime of funding based on private
contributions (businesses and families), and the implementation of new
public management (NPM) principles into the system of university
governance (managerialization process), including the evaluation of
teaching and research, which had a political aim of making English
universities competitive on the global market. The combination of
these two aspects acted as the hallmark of the building project of the
neoliberal university in English HE.
The main reason for this radical policy shift was the takeover of
political power by the Conservative government led by Margaret
73
Thatcher in 1979, that immediately set up and implemented a

neoliberal agenda of reforms for the UK. In this respect, the HE
reforms of the 1980s did not represent an exception; on the contrary,
they constituted one of the pillars of Mrs Thatcher’s neoliberal project,
aimed at promoting the market-oriented American model of HE in
the English system (McGettigan, 2013).
A political adviser of the coalition government in 2010 who
contributed to the reform of tuition fees and is today director of the
Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), an independent think
tank on HE, provided us with a similar interpretation in his historical
reconstruction of the period. Even though ‘marketization’ is publicly
considered as ‘toxic’, he did admit that English HE is today fully
marketized and that further marketization is needed to make HE more
efficient and valuable. In his words:
‘When I worked in government, we never used the

word marketization. We never claimed that our goal was
marketization. Even though we adopted [this kind of view]
by conceiving students as consumers. Students deserve
more information about the universities to choose better.
Marketization provides more student choice. Most people
go to universities to get more money with good jobs. After
all the university policy is placed in the business department.
Marketization is a toxic word, we don’t use it. Even though
we are aware that with these reforms we achieve an outcome
of more marketization. There is still a lot to do to make
HE a real market. I guess to Conservatives the principle of
profit-making universities is acceptable.’ (EN 12)
In tracing the history of English HE and of its transformations after

the Second World War, Claire Callender (Professor of HE Studies at
UCL) identifies two main phases, strictly associated with a shift in
the forms of capitalism (and of the state): one associated with the rise
and development of the welfare state and Fordism, the other with
neoliberal capitalism (and the neoliberal state). Through the 1980s
and the 1990s enhanced marketization emerged through several
policy and statutory changes and, despite changes in government, has
continued to the present day. According to Callender (2014, p 168),
‘What steers policy today are the private individual financial benefits
of higher education and a marketised system of higher education’.
She continues, ‘What have shifted since the Robbins Report are ideas
about the social purpose of higher education; who benefits and who
74
pays for higher education and, with that, the balance of public and
private contributions to higher education’. (Callender, 2014, p 180).
In other words, the focus of HE policy and policy rhetoric moved
from the public and social benefits of HE to an emphasis on markets
and the private, individual financial benefits of HE. While in the 1960s
the key beneficiary of HE was society, today it is individual students.
What is more, this shift from a public to a private-orientated approach
to HE, was shared, albeit for slightly different reasons, by both the
Conservative Party and the Labour Party. In her interview, an expert
in HE based in an English university argued:
‘Higher education came to be understood as a private

good rather than as a public good. On the right of the
political spectrum this view also supported the idea that
if higher education is a private good from which people
benefit then those people should pay for it. On the left of
the political spectrum there was the idea that since middle
class people attend in larger proportions higher education
than working class people, it is unfair that the latter fund
higher education with public taxes. So there was an attack
both from the right and the left of the political spectrum on
public funding for higher education. So it was quite difficult
to maintain public funding. Nobody was happy with this
idea of public funding. Additionally, vice-chancellors made
pressure for having more funding. Therefore, all these things
came together and caused the introduction of tuition fees
and loans.’ (EN 13)
The conception of HE as a private good, and therefore as an individual

and family cost, has also been the dominant policy orientation among
British vice-chancellors over the last 30 years. A former president
of the organization Universities UK5 (UUK) indeed confided to us,
“I’m in favour that people who attend universities should pay for
their own education. It’s a positional good.” (EN 14) For many of our
interviewees, the process of marketization represented a major and
irreversible change in the field of HE in recent English history.
These neoliberal transformations have heavily affected all the
dimensions of HE we analyzed in Chapter 1 (see Table 1.1). With
respect to university governance, for instance, the governance of English
universities moved away from a model of ‘self-academic government’
in which the role of academics was dominant, to an approach of ‘self-
managerial government’ where the role of ‘academic managers’, who
75
run the university as a business organization, is central (Cini, 2016).

As a senior manager of the University of Birmingham stated:
‘Being a good academic is not enough to be a good

university leader. You have also to understand politics and
money. In our universities, for instance, we compete for
all our income now. Not losing money in the things we
do is crucial. There has to be a clear understanding of the
business of the university in which we work. To a certain
extent, it is true that we are becoming [like] business people
in the universities.’ (EN 15)
In this sense, English universities are today forced to compete in what

a senior manager of UCL has laconically defined as a ‘neoliberalized
environment’. In his words:
‘I believe we live in a neoliberalized environment. … What

do I mean by that? The external environment in which
we operate is now a market-environment. We compete for
students, because through them we get more funding; we
compete for students from the European Union and [from]
out of the EU; more generally, we compete globally as
universities; in the UK, we compete for grant funding; and we
compete for staff. So, this means that the external environment
in which we operate is embedded into neoliberalism. The
environment is almost perfectly neoliberalized. This is a big
change compared to ten years ago, when most of our grant
was certain, guaranteed directly from our government. Now
it’s mostly competitively run.’ (EN 16)
Unlike HE sectors in continental Europe, such as Italy, France or

Germany, the pace and the novelty of these changes have in fact brought
about the establishment of a marketized sector whose features have
constituted an important landmark for the neoliberal reforms in other
European countries over the last 20 years (see Capano et al., 2017).
England can thus be considered as the first experiment of marketization
of HE, based on the American model, in the European area.
The recent round of neoliberal reforms in England

Dismantling the system of public funding for HE did not mean –
for the Conservatives –dismantling the English system of HE and
76
its quality. Considering the process of expansion of HE which was

taking place in the 1980s, and the financial implications of such
expansion in a context of declining GDP, the main objective of the
Conservative governments was precisely to maintain a high quality
standard of HE by replacing the public system of funding with a
private one, mostly consisting of student fees and loans. Confirming
such a policy goal, EN 12 confided to us that when implementing
the HE reforms of the 1980s “we did not want to reduce the amount
of funding for each student and the numbers of students. We wanted
to protect the funding.” To do this, Thatcher intended to bind HE
to the financial market. For a professor at the UCL Institute of
Education: “the government was over-borrowing. So, the idea was
to reduce the public expenditure on HE by maintaining the same
quality standard.” (EN 17)
The policy goal of widening student participation in HEIs in a
context of economic decline with the introduction of student loans
and fees proved to be relatively successful from the 1990s onwards.6 On
1 December 1994, there were over one and a half million students at
UK HEIs of whom 60.4 per cent were full-time, 8.3 per cent were on
sandwich courses, 29.2 per cent were part-time and the remainder (2.1
per cent) were employing other modes of study (including the writing
up of theses and dissertations). 78.6 per cent (1,231,988) of students
were undergraduates. 80.8 per cent of these students were studying for
a first degree, 19.2 per cent were on other undergraduate level courses.
Male students were slightly in the majority, making up 50.3 per cent
of the student population.7 As one can observe in Table 3.2 below,
the British system of HE reached the threshold of the universal system
of access of Trow’s typology (above 40 per cent of the age cohort of
19 years old) at the end of the 1990s after the implementation of the
first round of student fees introduced by the first Blair government
Table 3.2: Higher education initial participation rate (HEIPR)8 for first-time
participants in courses at UK higher education institutions and English,
Welsh and Scottish further education colleges (1999/2000–2005/6)
Academic 1999/ 2000/1 2001/2 2002/3 2003/4 2004/5 2005/6

year 2000
HEIPR 39 40 40 41 40 41 43
(male and (39.3) (39.7) (40.2) (41.2) (40.3) (41.3) (42.8)
female) %
Initial 239 239 244 255 257 268 283
entrants
(thousands)
77
(1997): from 39 per cent in the academic year 1999/2000 to 43 per

cent in 2005/2006.
More impressive are the data following the economic crisis and the
introduction of the law providing for the tripling of tuition fees. In
the academic year 2010/11, 2.56 million students were studying for
a qualification or for credit at 164 UK HEIs. Over two thirds (67.1
per cent) of the HE students were following a full-time programme.
A higher proportion of female students (56.4 per cent) than male
students (43.6 per cent) were studying in HE in the UK. This gender
imbalance was more pronounced among students studying part-time,
of whom 61.1 per cent were female. Among other undergraduate
students, nearly two thirds (64.3 per cent) were female.9
The data show that between 2008/9 and 2015/16 there was a fall
in the total number of UK domiciled10 undergraduate students in
HE, from 1,673,655 in 2008/9 to 1,509,560 in 2015/16. However,
this overall change masks significant variations when the data are
broken down by mode and level. There has been an overall rise in
the number of UK domiciled first degree students (that is, students
pursuing bachelor’s degrees), from 1,198,385 in 2008/9 to 1,342,770
in 2015/16. This total includes a rise among those studying full-time
(from 1,001,995 to 1,172,855), and a drop in those studying part-time
(from 196,395 to 169,915). By contrast, the number of UK domiciled
students pursuing other undergraduate programmes (not bachelor’s
degree students) has fallen significantly, from 475,265 in 2008/9 to
166,795 in 2015/16).11 Overall, by the academic year 2011/12 the
participation rate had risen to 49 per cent but fell back to 47 per cent
in 2013/14 because of the introduction of full student fees (Boden
et al., forthcoming).
Over the last three decades British governments have successfully
reached the goal of widening student participation in HEIs in a context
of increasing marketization. Yet, widening student participation has
never meant the reduction of the gap, in terms of university access,
between students with different social backgrounds. On the contrary,
the privatization of the system of funding, exemplified by the
introduction of student loans and fees, has accentuated the disparities
of access between pupils and prospective students with a middle
class background and those with a working class one. Exploring this
process, Callender and Mason (2017, p 27) indeed noted that ‘the gap
in attitudes between lower and upper-class students widened, and fear
of debt negatively contributed to lower-class students’ anticipated HE
participation relative to other social classes’. The fact that they also
found out that ‘debt aversion seems more likely to deter anticipated HE
78
participation among lower-class students in 2015 than in 2002’ (2017,

p 26) seems to confirm the hypothesis that the introduction of student
fees has played a significant role in explaining such a difference.12 In
short, debt averse attitudes contribute to lower HE participation by
lower class students.
The first decade of the 2000s marked a decisive turning point in
the marketization of HE, as governments of all political hues enacted
laws outsourcing services, cutting public funding, implementing the
managerialization of governing bodies, and introducing tuition fees and
student loans (McGettigan, 2013; Cini and Guzmán-Concha, 2017).
With respect to the funding system, this period clearly represented
an acceleration of the privatization trend, culminating in the 2010
reform of tuition fees.
In 1998, the New Labour government led by Mr Blair enacted a law
which, for the first time in the history of English HE, introduced a
system of tuition fees for university students, capped at £1,000 per year.
In other words, New Labour continued the path of commodification
of English HE that the Conservatives had kicked off in the early 1980s.
In this sense, there was no significantly distinct political orientation
with respect to university funding between the Conservatives and the
New Labour Party of Tony Blair.
Comparing the political orientations towards HE of the two main
parties over the last two decades, a professor of higher education policy
based in London indeed pointed out that at the time there was very
little difference: “The Tories have finished off what Labour started
with Tony Blair. Labour started the marketization. In many senses,
what the Tories are doing now is just a continuation of what Labour
introduced.” (EN 18) In this sense –for another professor of higher
education in a London-based university –“there was a unified policy
agenda that has brought about the process of marketization without
questioning it. There has never been a serious public debate about
this process.” (EN 19) EN 13 pointed at some peculiar aspects of this
process in her account of this period. She claimed:
‘there is a lot of consensus about the meaning and purpose

of higher education in today’s UK. Both parties have put
forward policies aimed at cutting public funding to HE.
So, nothing controversial on substantive matters. The two
main parties were very influenced by the vice-chancellors
on the quest for more [private] money to be brought into
the universities. Both parties had a neoliberal project of
HE. There is not a single important voice very critical
79
towards this agenda: neither at the political level, nor at

the institutional level, nor at the economic and/or social
level. Beginning with Thatcher, all the political reforms
of the last 30 years have been underpinned by these
views.’ (EN 13)
In continuity with such a policy of privatization, the Labour Party

produced in 2003 a White Paper, ‘The Future of Higher Education’,
that regarded increasing university fees as one of the key measures to
promote a first-rate system of HE. In 2004, the ‘Higher Education
Act’ put forward that proposal, introducing a system of variable (and
higher) tuition fees, establishing a £3,290 per year cap (instead of the
former £1,000) on the amount that universities can charge to students.
It was within such a normative framework13 that, on 12 October
2010, the Browne Review or Independent Review of ‘Higher
Education Funding and Student Finance’ was released. The review,
whose name derives from the chair –Lord Browne of Madingley –
recommended wide-ranging changes to the system of university
funding, among which was the removal of the cap on the level of
fees that universities can charge and a cut to the teaching budget up
to £700 million, with funding concentrated in priority areas such as
medicine and engineering. In Browne’s view, a better HE system could
be achieved only if universities were allowed to charge their students
the level of tuition fees considered necessary.
On 14 November the coalition government introduced legislation
to implement the Browne proposals, with some modifications. First,
the government announced the implementation of a plan of cuts
in public funding for humanities departments (80 per cent of all
university teaching revenues), maintaining instead the same amount
of provision for the so-called priority subjects. Second, and most
importantly, the most significant modification provided for by the
government’s proposal concerned the increase in tuition fees. Instead
of removing the cap on the level of fees that universities could
charge –as suggested by the review –the government’s proposal
established a £9,000 cap per year on tuition fees. 14 Finally, the
government’s plan envisaged another highly-contested proposal: the
abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). The
EMA is a means-tested scheme devised to make college education
more attractive to students from poorer backgrounds: it is a weekly
payment of up to £30 for 16 to 18-year-olds having a household
income of less than £30,810. Most of the students who benefit from
this scheme are in further education (FE).15
80
In sum, England represented a paradigmatic case of early adoption

of neoliberalism, with policies of deregulation, privatization and
commodification of areas previously protected being implemented
in a very radical manner. The cost of tuition has been growing over
recent decades, with universities suffering budget cuts that date
back to the 1980s. Moreover, measures of managerialization and
performance assessment have been applied since then. Decisive policy
changes advancing HE liberalization also occurred under centre-left
governments –although protests have been more intense under centre-
right or conservative governments (Cini and Guzmán-Concha, 2017).
Higher-education transformations in Quebec: a

not-fully-marketized sector?
In the federal state of Canada, education policies are legislated at the
provincial level (that is, the state level). Over the last 50 years, the
provincial state in Quebec has acquired competences that are normally
the privilege of national states, and in some areas its competences exceed
those of other provinces in the country. For example, immigration,
taxes, healthcare and education are devolved to the provincial, Quebec
level. The origins of the contemporary HE system in this province are
to be found in the Quiet Revolution, the revolution tranquille of the
1960s. The concept refers to an intense reformist period led by the
premier Jean Lesage from the PLQ, which included profound changes
to the economy, society and construction of a modern welfare state.
Moreover, the period is characterized by a revival of a nationalist
sentiment, with demands concerning language and recognition for
the francophone culture acquiring great centrality in public debate.
The emergence of a strong pro-sovereignty movement in this period is
related to the socio-economic inequalities of the region, in particular,
the position of perceived backwardness experienced historically by the
francophone population (Graefe, 2016).
Lesage promoted the secularization of society, which included the
creation of national educational institutions. His government placed
education as a national priority in the project of modernization,
and set up a Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education. The
commission was headed by a Catholic clergyman, Msgr Alphonse-
Marie Parent (1906–70), who served as chairman from 1961 to 1966.
The Parent commission delivered a lengthy report that contained a
number of recommendations for public policy, which the government
implemented in large measure. The government created the Ministry of
Education (1964) and took control over the school system, drastically
81
reducing the number of establishments in the hands of the Catholic

and Protestant churches (Dufour, 1997). The Parent report established
that education should be seen as a social right, which included the
commitment to accessible French language HE, and the creation of
a tuition fee system of post-secondary colleges (Collège d’enseignement
général et professional, CEGEPs). As many as 21 CEGEPs were created
in 1967, offering two-year programmes leading to university and
three-year programmes of technical education leading directly to the
labour market. The system continued its expansion throughout the
1970s; there are 48 CEGEPs at the present time, with only five of
them being English language colleges.
Until the 1960s only three francophone universities existed: Université
Laval, Université de Montréal and Université de Sherbrooke. Moreover,
there were three English language universities: McGill, Bishop’s and Sir
George Williams (which after its merger with Loyola College would
become Concordia University in 1974). All of them had the status
of public universities and as such they were funded by the provincial
government. The Parent report suggested that, to meet the demands
for FE of a growing population (in the context of the baby boom)
and to contribute to national development, the university system
should be expanded. Thus, the government created the Université du
Québec network of institutions in 1968. The network started with
four campuses (Montreal, Trois Rivieres, Chicoutimi, Rimouski),
but currently there are ten universities distributed across the province.
One of the main goals of this network is to ensure the geographical
accessibility of universities to all Quebecers.16
Drawing on the recommendations of the Parent report, the
government adopted the goal of making HE financially accessible,
and while CEGEPs were established as tuition fees, a small fee was
introduced for university education. Imposed in the 1960s, tuition fees
were considered a transitory measure that was required to ensure the
expansion of the university system. However, it established a horizon,
a goal to be achieved in the medium to long term, which became one
of the main aspirations of student unions ever since.
Tuition fees were nominally frozen between 1968 to 1990. In 1986,
during the government of Robert Bourassa (PLQ), the Gobeil report
recommended increasing tuition fees three or fourfold, depending on
the programme. This report proposed a radical departure from the
principles that had guided the development of the welfare state in
the 1960s, as it suggested a vast programme of state retrenchment and
privatization of public companies and services (Ratel and Verreault-
Julien, 2006). In 1990 the same government ended the tuition fee
82
freeze, introducing a C$280 increase per year over four years, which
students unsuccessfully resisted. Between 1989 and 1994, tuition fees
increased from C$567 to C$1,668 (Maroy et al., 2014). In 1994, the
PQ government of Lucien Bouchard announced a freeze in tuition
fees, which the same administration would however contradict in
1996 when it announced a 30 per cent increase. The PQ, a political
party that embraced social democratic principles in the 1970s, had in
fact then aligned with the rhetoric of zero deficit for public budgets.
Massive opposition from student associations succeeded in halting the
tuition fee hikes this time (Ratel and Verreault-Julien, 2006). Tuition
fees remained frozen until 2007.
Higher-education reforms in Quebec in the 2000s

Since the 1990s, with the Quiet Revolution’s promise of free university
education fading into the past, provincial governments have attempted
to raise tuition fees. As governments of different colours have embraced
the need to augment the contributions of families and students to
finance the HE system, student aid programmes and tuition fee levels
have become major issues in the HE discussion. In 2005, in the context
of a PLQ government that was committed to run a public budget of
austerity, the Quebec government proposed changing C$100 million of
grants into loans. Students, led by CASSÉÉ, the antecedent of CLASSE,
opposed this shift with strikes and demonstrations. As mentioned in
the previous chapter, the mobilization levels were significant, with the
longest strike in Quebec history until that point (6 weeks) and the
largest student demonstration on 15 March 2005 (100,000 protesters).
An agreement was then reached when the Canadian Millenium
Scholarship Foundation agreed to fund scholarships and to even
increase them in Quebec in exchange for the partial withdrawal of the
provincial government proposal (Maroy et al., 2014). While FECQ and
FEUQ supported the agreement, CASSÉÉ refused it. The associations
affiliated to the coalition continued the strike, but they were not able
to achieve further changes. For the coalition, ‘the changes this [reform]
will bring are not simple readjustments: this reform is a general attack
on the accessibility of education, on the autonomy of students and
students benefiting [from state support] and an obvious gift to financial
institutions’ (CASSÉÉ, cited in Armstrong, 2014).
In 2007, the PLQ administration announced an increase in tuition
fees, by C$50 per semester over the next five years (C$500 in total).
Students associations protested the measure but were not able to
mobilize in large numbers against it. In 2010, the government reiterated
83
its intention to address the so-called problem of ‘severe underfunding

of the university system’ with further increases in tuition fees. This
announcement would materialize with the presentation of the public
budget in 2011, despite student associations declaring their opposition
and demanding negotiations with the government. As the government
did not consent to discuss the matter with student representatives, by
the end of 2011 CLASSE was determined to initiate a strike at the
beginning of 2012.
The policy of low tuition fees in the Quebec university system
favoured the expansion of HE in social strata that had been less likely
to attend university (Maroy et al., 2014). As Maroy and his colleagues
put it, ‘the number of students increased continuously from 1966 to
1990, especially in French speaking universities. Between 1991 and
2001, enrolment stagnated and even declined. Higher tuition fees in
the early 1990s were followed by a decrease in the student population
of francophone universities. Since then, growth has resumed, but at a
lower rate’ (Maroy et al., 2014, p 189). The policies adopted since the
1960s have indeed improved access to university education (Laplante
et al., 2016).
Access to university education has been a central issue in the
structuration of the HE system since the 1960s. The goals of democratic
and egalitarian access to a university system that were considered a key
component of a strategy of socio-economic development and nation
building became inscribed in the collective imagination of Quebec
society. The state itself actively attempted to fulfil this goal, at least until
the 1990s. Student activism emerged in the context of this national
project, borrowing ideas and inspiration from the French anti-fascist
model of militant trade unionism. In this context, it has played the
role of vanguard for the realization of these ideals, staging eight general
strikes before 2012 (1968, 1974, 1978, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1996 and
2005). All of these strikes have been related to tuition fees and the
system of bursaries and loans, achieving the withdrawal of proposed
hikes and the expansion of student aid schemes (Poirier St-Pierre and
Éthier, 2013). Thus, student associations have been a powerful factor
in the HE system, and arguably have contributed to the building of a
pattern of (relatively) low tuition fees in Quebec, within the context
of North America, to date. According to official statistics, Quebec has
the second lowest tuition fee average in Canada (C$2,851 in 2016),
well below the C$6,373 average, with Newfoundland and Labrador
being the province with the lowest tuition (C$2,759). The highest
tuition fees are in Ontario (C$8,144) and Nova Scotia (C$7,218)
(Statistics Canada, 2016).
84
The lobby of university principals, CREPUQ (Conference Des

Recteurs Et Des Principaux Des Universités Du Québec), has also
played an important role in HE. Founded in 1967, it represented
universities to the provincial authorities and was a privileged interlocutor
with the government. In addition to lobbying, CREPUQ developed
a tight coordination among universities in regard to various issues
such as exchange and international programmes, credit recognition,
library loan agreements in Quebec and Canada, and negotiation of
group licenses, among other things. The body was supportive of the
proposal of tuition hikes by the Charest administration in 2010–11,
and had long been aligned with the notion that the main problem of
the university system was a situation of underfunding provoked by
the tuition fee freezes of the past (Katz, 2015). The 2012 strike made
evident important differences among universities within this body, in
particular between the group of so-called chartered universities on
the one hand –that is, those institutions whose existence has been
sanctioned by special laws –and the ten institutions that belong to the
Université de Québec network on the other. While all universities
in the province are public and receive public funding, the universities
created before the 1960s and especially the Anglophone ones have
different origins that in turn affect their governance. These universities
want to preserve their distinctiveness and autonomy, granted by special
charters. In turn, the institutions in the Université de Québec network
demand treatment according to their public role in delivering university
education across the province. Furthermore, research-intensive
institutions demand policies and subsidies that allow them to compete
in the global market of HE. Anglophone universities would be better
positioned to attract foreign students and researchers than francophone
institutions. These divides show a growing process of differentiation
in the university system that the recent student protests made visible
and accelerated.
One of the representatives of the Bureau de coopération
interuniversitaire, a professor in a leadership position in a highly
prestigious French-speaking university, described the process that leads
to differentiation as follows:
‘we need a little more money to be competitive. The

question is, it will be impossible to have 18 universities
among the top 1 per cent. So, are we looking for the 18
universities within the first 5 per cent in the world, 10 per
cent? I don’t know. Or, are we looking to keep McGill and
University of Montreal in the top 100 of the world? So,
85
if we want, and if McGill wants, to stay in the top 1 per

cent, same thing for University of Montreal, we will need
more money, that’s for sure. … So, the question is: should
they give equally to each university, telling [them] that
they will be all good? But we need also in the country, the
province, a top university, a really top university. And top
universities will cost more than the average university. …
We don’t really care from where the money will come, from
the government or from the students.’ (QUE 3)
The political consensus around the notion of free university education

as a desirable policy goal, forged in Quebec during the period of the
Quiet Revolution, has been challenged. However, a new consensus
based on alternative ideas such as the just contribution of families and
students to HE has been difficult to achieve. This has created tensions
that can also be observed in other fields of social policy that have been
the target of neoliberal reforms. Expressions of these tensions are found
in the opposition of student associations and trade unions to successive
plans of austerity and reduction of the public deficit since the 1990s.
Higher-education transformations in Italy:

a not-fully-marketized sector?
Unlike other countries (UK, Chile and Spain), the admission system to
Italian universities has never been ‘conditional’ in the sense of allowing
the admission of new first year students based on the performance of
applicants in standardized tests.17 Nor has admission ever depended on
average marks during secondary school, or on a combination of these
two (selection based on merit at the end of high school). Despite the
absence of these mechanisms of selection, only a tiny minority of the
age cohort of 19-year-olds was allowed to enrol in Italian universities
in the two decades following the Second World War. More notably,
only pupils graduating from humanities and scientific high schools
were formally admitted to university. The majority of these came
from families with a middle or an upper class background. As a result,
and like other university systems in continental Europe during the
1950s and 1960s, the Italian university system was structurally ‘elitist’
(Trow, 2006).
However, from the late 1950s onwards, the Italian university system
began undergoing a process of massification without any significant
change being made to institutional arrangements (Capano et al.,
2017). Only at the end of the 1960s did the then Italian government
86
Figure 3.1: Number of first-year university enrolments
400,000
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
1971/72
1973/74
1975/76
1977/78
1979/80
1981/82
1983/84
1985/86
1987/88
1989/90
1991/92
1993/94
1995/96
1997/98
1999/00
2001/02
2003/04
2005/06
2007/08
2009/10
2011/12
2013/14
Source: Istat, Survey on Universities, Years 1971–97; MIUR, Survey on Universities, Years
1998–2014.
adopt some legislative measures to tackle the issue of massification

by gradually initiating a process of liberalization of university access
(Ortoleva, 1988). In this regard, the Codignola law was introduced
(no. 910) on 11 December 1969, granting all those with a high school
diploma of any kind access to all university faculties and liberalizing
individual courses of study, while allowing students to freely choose
and arrange personalized plans of study (Palermo, 2011). Compared
to the 1950s, Italian universities became more democratic; every
person with a high school diploma could now enter any university
and elaborate his/her own study plan regardless of the strict official
programmes provided by the Ministry of Education. As Figure 3.1
shows, after the liberalization of university access in 1970, the number
of first year students enrolled has increased, following a gradual yet
constant trend with slight up-and-downs over the course of the entire
period (1971–2014).
Since the academic year 1974/75 (228,173 students), the increase
in the number enrolled has never been less than 7 per cent per year.
In the year 1990/91, the number enrolled went beyond, for the first
time, the threshold of 300,000 (318,419). The peak of the entire period
(360,238) was achieved in the year 1993/94, when the increase in terms
of first year enrolments reached almost 70 per cent vis-à-vis 1971/72
(212,098). Only with the onset of the economic crisis in 2008/9 did
the number of students enrolled gradually start to decrease year-on-
year, reaching the lowest value of 252,457 in 2013/14 (approaching
the number enrolled in the academic year 1983/84, 251,799).
87
Figure 3.2: Percentage of students enrolling at university, aged

19–25 years, by gender and total (1971/72–2013/14)
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1971/72
1973/74
1975/76
1977/78
1979/80
1981/82
1983/84
1985/86
1987/88
1989/90
1991/92
1993/94
1995/96
1997/98
1999/00
2001/02
2003/04
2005/06
2007/08
2009/10
2011/12
2013/14
Enrolment rate: 1971/72–2013/14 (Male)
Enrolment rate: 1971/72–2013/14 (Female)
Enrolment rate: 1971/72–2013/14 (Total)
Source: Istat, Survey on Universities, Years 1971–97; MIUR, Survey on Universities, Years
1998–2014.
Even more interesting are the data showcasing the rate of student
enrolment per 100 young people (also by gender) aged 19–25 in the
period between 1971–2014 that are illustrated in Figure 3.2. If up to
the academic year 1973/74 the Italian system of HE was still considered
as ‘elitist’ (1971/72: 13.4 per cent; 1972/73: 14.2 per cent; 1973/
74: 15.1 per cent), from 1975 it finally took on the characteristics of
the ‘mass’ model (16.1 per cent). Yet, and unlike the HE systems of
northern European countries, the Italian system has never managed
to become a universal system of HE.
More specifically, the rate of student enrolments has constantly
increased throughout this period, reaching its peak in the academic
year 2008/9 (41.5 per cent), after which, and in the aftermath of the
economic crisis, it started to decline overall (2009/10: 39.6 per cent;
2010/11: 39 per cent; 2011/12: 39.2 per cent; 2012/13: 39.3 per cent;
2013/14: 38 per cent). By and large, and if compared to the other
cases under investigation, Italy has exhibited a relatively low trend of
student enrolments, along with a delayed intervention by the legislature
on the matter of HE, throughout the entire republican period (from
1948 onwards).
These features of Italian HE could also be imputed to the relatively
low interest that Italian society has historically exhibited towards HE.
Indeed, the main political parties and actors have overall shown little
88
attention to the issue of HE (Capano et al., 2017). Such a low level

of interest was not limited to the political system, but also shared
by other social actors, such as the main Italian businesses and, more
broadly, by public opinion. For several Italian policy experts and
scholars, the historically low level of attention towards HE policy
has been one of the main factors explaining the delay by Italian
governments in adopting and implementing systematic reforms
of HE in line with the Anglo-American model of the 1980s (see
Moscati, 2012; Capano et al., 2017). According to Moscati (2012),
when dealing with the matter of HE, Italian governments have
mostly adopted a sort of ‘mosaic strategy’. Italian HE reforms were
normally the outcome of non-linear policy processes, not completely
linked to a general framework of modernization of the HE sector as
in northern European countries. This may explain why a systematic
plan of reforms of Italian HE was designed and implemented only in
the early 1990s, with the adoption of a set of measures based upon
the principles of NPM.
The declared purpose of these reforms, also known as ‘the autonomy
reforms’ (reforms for enhancing institutional autonomy in the sector)
was to drastically reduce the rate of dropout and the period spent in
university by most Italian students. As a professor of public policy at an
Italian university put it in his interview: “Italian universities … were
inefficient. Autonomy served to limit the efficiency of the system with
many dropouts (above 60 per cent until 2000).” (IT 8) The autonomy
reforms were designed to restructure the Italian HE sector following
principles of efficiency and effectiveness. The reforms introduced
contract management, evaluation and assessment, as well as institutional
autonomy and accountability.
More specifically, the Italian legislature pursued three key principles
of the NPM narrative through these reforms: autonomy, evaluation/
assessment, and financial accountability/responsibility. As summarized
by Regini (2014, p 19), the three pillars of the autonomy reforms
were: ‘x) awarding of institutional autonomy to individual universities;
y) introduction of competitive mechanisms of funding rewarding or
penalizing universities on the basis of the results achieved; z) evaluation
of the quality of research and teaching of each autonomous university.’
The substantial and political aim of these reforms was to stimulate the
entrance of market and entrepreneurial mechanisms in the university
system and, at the same time, to enable the state to devise, administer
and implement standards to reward good practice and punish weak
performance. In the view of a former consultant of the university
funding system for the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities
89
and Research (MUIR) (1993–8), behind autonomy there was “a

sleek design, the idea that you could rule the system through a quasi-
market mechanism, through the allocation of resources based on an
incentive mechanism” (IT 9). In the same vein, a former minister of the
MIUR (1996–8) stated that, “the general interest was first to connect
the university with the professions market. … Therefore, there were
objective social interests supporting those reforms.” (IT 10)
Law 168/1989 introduced important structural changes in terms of
the distribution of authority, degree of autonomy of the institutions,
and mechanisms of coordination. The rationale of the law was to move
towards a supervisory model of governance, in which the state engages
in incentive-based steering from a distance, that is, by ‘setting the legal
and financial boundaries and using instruments of quality control’
(Moscati, 2012). For this to happen, first Law 168/1989 established
the MIUR as the principal state authority for governing and funding
the national research system. Second, it allowed the universities some
facets and degrees of autonomy, which had to go alongside the setting
up of an evaluation system that conferred on them the power to approve
their own statutes and regulations in the framework of greater financial
and organizational independence.
For financial accountability to happen, the then Italian government
approved an amendment to the state general financial law of 1993,
allowing the MIUR to give annually a lump sum to each university,
distributed according to certain parameters. This measure established
the responsibility of universities for the allocation of resources given by
the state; a change from line item budgeting to lump sum budgeting.
The universities became responsible for decisions over the composition
of their teaching personnel: the number of professors needed, the
qualifications requested, the distribution by professional level, and
recruitment policies. For IT 9, “the new system of funding represented a
Copernican revolution”. The transformation of the financial leverage was
considered as a most important aspect of the reform. According to IT 8:
‘We tend to overlook the epochal passage epitomized by

the financial autonomy introduced in 1994. Since 1994
onwards, universities have had a financial budget at their
own disposal. Before 1994, it was the Minister who used
to tell you even how much toilet paper you were supposed
to buy.’
Finally, the principle of evaluation was introduced shortly after the

implementation of financial autonomy, when the MIUR created
90
the Observatory of the Universities (in 1999 transformed into the

National Committee for the Evaluation of Universities, CNVSU) as
the national agency responsible for the evaluation of both teaching
and research at the system level, and the Units of Internal Evaluation
as the local organs of evaluation designed to assess the efficiency and
effectiveness of teaching and research expenditure within and for each
university. With this third and final set of interventions (along with the
introduction of institutional autonomy and financial accountability),
the governments of the 1990s aimed at fully enacting the building
process of the neoliberal university in Italy.
However, the adoption of these reforms failed to bring about the
expected effects on the field of HE, which showed, in fact, a great ability
to avoid change and maintain its key features: an enduring domination
of professorial power in the governing bodies of universities; informal
and persisting procedures of ‘collective self-promotion’ of the baronial
class (Palermo, 2011); and lack of clear and binding mechanisms of
self-evaluation and self-assessment of teaching and research.
To sum up, two significant problems for the implementation of the
reforms were detected by various policy experts (see Capano et al.,
2017). First, these reforms were introduced to the academic world
from the outside; from political institutions. As a professor of sociology
of education at a university in Milan confirmed, “the main political
mistake was to propose a change from above, without discussing
with and involving the academic class. A top-down approach. The
academic class has thus formally implemented the reforms, but it has
substantially continued to act on its own head.” (IT 11) Similarly, IT
10 argued, “it was our own decision, outside of the academic world.”
Second, although a significant number of different and various interests
supported them, the institutions had no real and strong political
project. For IT 8, the absence of a clear political vision for universities
represented a truly “Italian peculiarity”.
‘In England, there is a political vision on the role of

university within society. The politician is not the mediator
of social interests, but he is the actor leading the policy
process. In Italy, we do not have this thing. Our politicians
have never had their own vision on the university system.
They have always played the role of mediators … we do not
have a university policy. At the ministry, there is nobody
who has a political vision on our educational policy. The
state officials are all legal experts who do not know much
about university.’
91
Thus, the policy field of HE exhibits the typical structure of Italian

policy making; generally, there is no political design or systematic plan
to adopt and implement, but only ad-hoc measures, often contingent
outcomes of power struggles between different interest groups behind
closed doors (see Capano et al., 2017). This policy pattern constitutes a
significant difference vis-à-vis the patterns of Chile or England, where
a specific and consistent set of interests and ideas usually dominates the
field by driving its policies.
Higher-education reforms in Italy in the 2000s

With the aim of correcting the ‘bad’ implementation of the autonomy
reforms of the 1990s, which was considered to have benefited the class
of professors, the plan of HE reforms of the 2000s, carried out by
the second and third Berlusconi governments, aimed at reducing the
power of academics and accelerating university marketization. In the
government’s view, Italian professors had taken advantage of the new
institutional conditions of a system capable of ‘producing autonomy
without accountability’ (in recruitment policy, career promotion
and organization of curricula), namely, autonomy not accompanied
by a complementary process of institutional competition and
evaluation (Regini, 2014, p 25). This situation of ‘autonomy without
accountability’ was particularly problematic after the implementation
in 1997 of the principle of didactic autonomy, which, according to
several policy experts and consultants close to the Italian government,
fostered a proliferation and multiplication of courses, programmes,
and curricula, created ad hoc to expand the number and resources of
various disciplinary groups.
In the years 2004–10 all the efforts of the Berlusconi governments
were thus officially directed towards reversing what they perceived as
professorial abuses resulting from the process of autonomy by making
the governance structure of the universities more managerial. It was,
they claimed, to punish these abuses that in 2008 the Berlusconi
government introduced with Law 133 the most impressive cuts in
public spending for the Italian field of HE. The cutbacks provided for
by Law 133 (€1.5 billion in five years), perceived as the final attack on
the conception of HE as a public good, sparked the massive student
protests occurring in 2008 (see Chapter 2).
A further and significant step in the process of university
marketization was taken in 2006, when the government established
the ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of Higher
Education and Research) replacing the previous evaluation agency
92
(CNVSU). De facto a section of the MIUR, the ANVUR was aimed

at rationalizing ‘the system of quality assessment activities of university
research institutions and public and private receipt of public funds’.
The results of its assessment activities were expected ‘to constitute a
reference mark for the allocation of state funding to universities and
research institutes’ (Law 240/2010). Thereby the establishment of the
ANVUR triggered both a process of national (re)centralization of
some key functions of universities (such as content and direction of
research, management of funding, and so on), and an acceleration of
the internal managerialization of university governance.
The thrust towards a managerialized type of university governance
had been a goal of all right-wing Italian governments. The governance
of Italian universities maintained four distinguishable characteristics
throughout the 2000s, featuring still the presence of a strong academic
oligarchy (Dobbins and Knill, 2014). First, Italian universities
experienced a ‘bloating’ of both main academic management
institutions –the academic senate and the board of administration –
to accommodate all actors, more especially all the factions of the
departments and disciplinary groups. Second, the incorporation of
such a broad spectrum of interests and actors led to tedious processes
of consensus-finding. This brought about a very slow decision-making
process based on the ‘corporatist-democratic’ negotiation among all
the university disciplinary groups (Capano, 2008). Third, due to the
strong academic presence, both governing bodies were staffed with
people who were strongly affected by the decisions taken, in particular
those of a distributive nature. Fourth, the academic dominance of the
board of administration brought about a lack of staff with budgeting
and entrepreneurial skills.
To contrast these aspects, the plan of HE reform, approved at the
end of 2010 (Law 240/2010) represented –in the intention of the then
Minister of Higher Education, Maria Stella Gelmini, as claimed to the
media –the most important attempt to crack down on the power of
academics and turn the system of internal authority in the direction of a
managerial pattern of governance, as experienced in the English HEIs.
Law 240/2010 established thus several substantial novelties mainly on
the matter of the restructuring of governance.
Most notably, the reform aimed at changing the Italian university
governance in three directions: (a) the centralization of the university
leadership, (b) the managerialization of decisional bodies, and (c) the
reduction of the power of the collegial organs (Regini, 2014). For
this to happen, the law elevated the role of the rector to that of a
university top manager by setting a term of six years’ mandate not
93
renewable, and essentially making this organ the politically leading

figure responsible for the whole university. More importantly, Law 240
aimed to differentiate between the functions of the academic senate
and the board of administration by conferring more substantive power
to the latter. While the decisional power of the senate was restricted
to mere academic issues such as the organization of curricula and
courses, the board of administration acquired all the decisional powers
over the main financial and administrative issues of the university, such
as the annual (and triennial) budget plans and staff recruitment. The
board of administrators, in part appointed by the rector, and which had
to include at least three members coming from external stakeholders,
became the strategic-political body of the university.
Moreover, allegedly to curb the problem of democratic over-
representation of academics in all governing bodies, Law 240 prescribed
to shut down the faculties, considered as the historical locus of
academics, and replace them with departments, to which a certain
financial autonomy was now awarded. Finally, Law 240 prescribed that
the universities rewrite their statutes by the end of 2011 with the aim
of implementing the new managerial principles in their governance
structure. It was precisely to halt such a managerialization of HE that
Italian students and researchers rose up and mobilized between late
2010 and early 2011 (see Chapter 2).
In sum, the HE reforms of the 2000s, aimed at restructuring the
sector on the basis of NPM principles to make it more competitive
and marketized, begot a significant discontent among various
university actors (especially the weakest ones, such as students and
junior academics) which in a few years coalesced, giving rise to the
mobilizations of 2008 and 2010.
Conclusions
The cost of HE must be seen as a crucial aspect in the process of
the marketization of HE, considering its direct impact on the life
conditions of students and of their families. The transfer of funding
responsibilities from the state to the families (or the customers) thus
constitutes a potential source of discontent. This process, if it is
accompanied by a rapid expansion of enrolment in tertiary education,
can become particularly destabilizing. Student struggles over the process
of privatization and/or reduction of public funding represent clear
instances of contestation to the marketization of academia. Tuition fees
are today a major distributional issue, as it refers to the classic political
94
economy questions: who is going to bear the financial burden of tertiary

education? Who benefits from higher levels of tertiary education? This
is a crucial normative issue that is often sidelined by policy makers and
politicians (Cini and Guzmán-Concha, 2017).
In this chapter, we have summarized the processes of marketization
in the fields of HE of Chile, England, Italy and Quebec over the last
three decades. Although a common trend of convergence towards a
neoliberal model of HE can be noticed, differences in the specific
policy measures implemented by each government remain pronounced.
The presence of specific values concerning the role of the state in the
funding of HE, the pace of implementation of neoliberal policies, the
degree of institutional autonomy conferred to individual universities,
and the employment relations of their staff all played a decisive role in
the way the four political-institutional contexts shaped the norms of
behaviour of the university actors. As shown in this chapter, England
and Chile proved to be more permeable with regard to the introduction
of neoliberal practices in HE than Italy and Quebec.
Such a different pace in the marketization process has also heavily
impacted in the practices and conceptions of the leading university
actors. This also reflected in the different reactions of various HE
actors during the episodes of student unrest analyzed in this book.
These differences in the adoption of pro-market norms and practices
shaped different structures of opportunity (and constraint) for students,
universities and governments, among the four cases studied, as will be
explained in the following chapters.
95
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Higher Education Policies

Chapter · June 2020

Lorenzo Cini Cesar Guzman-Concha

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Chapter Title: Higher Education Policies

Book Title: Contesting Higher Education

Higher Education Policies

In contrast with the dominant research trend in social movement

Austerity measures, following the crisis, have introduced neoliberal

The formation of the neoliberal university in Chile

1973, the state had a leading role in the guidance of HE policies. In

and only 22 universities received public funding. Among the 280

disappear in 1994, when it was expected that the system would be

The recent round of neoliberal reforms in Chile

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

Bank, 2011; Olavarría and Allende, 2013). Additional incentives

1990 2005 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Higher Education Policies

than 10 per cent of the HE budget. In contrast, student aid programmes

The reforms initiated during the second Bachelet administration

The formation of the neoliberal university in England

Thatcher in 1979, that immediately set up and implemented a

‘When I worked in government, we never used the

In tracing the history of English HE and of its transformations after

‘Higher education came to be understood as a private

The conception of HE as a private good, and therefore as an individual

run the university as a business organization, is central (Cini, 2016).

‘Being a good academic is not enough to be a good

In this sense, English universities are today forced to compete in what

‘I believe we live in a neoliberalized environment. … What

Unlike HE sectors in continental Europe, such as Italy, France or

The recent round of neoliberal reforms in England

its quality. Considering the process of expansion of HE which was

Academic 1999/​ 2000/​1 2001/​2 2002/​3 2003/​4 2004/​5 2005/​6

(1997): from 39 per cent in the academic year 1999/​2000 to 43 per

participation among lower-​class students in 2015 than in 2002’ (2017,

‘there is a lot of consensus about the meaning and purpose

towards this agenda: neither at the political level, nor at

In continuity with such a policy of privatization, the Labour Party

In sum, England represented a paradigmatic case of early adoption

Higher-education transformations in Quebec: a

reducing the number of establishments in the hands of the Catholic

Higher-education reforms in Quebec in the 2000s

its intention to address the so-​called problem of ‘severe underfunding

The lobby of university principals, CREPUQ (Conference Des

‘we need a little more money to be competitive. The

if we want, and if McGill wants, to stay in the top 1 per

The political consensus around the notion of free university education

Higher-education transformations in Italy:

Figure 3.1: Number of first-year university enrolments

adopt some legislative measures to tackle the issue of massification

Figure 3.2: Percentage of students enrolling at university, aged

attention to the issue of HE (Capano et al., 2017). Such a low level

and Research (MUIR) (1993–​8), behind autonomy there was “a

‘We tend to overlook the epochal passage epitomized by

Finally, the principle of evaluation was introduced shortly after the

the Observatory of the Universities (in 1999 transformed into the

‘In England, there is a political vision on the role of

Thus, the policy field of HE exhibits the typical structure of Italian

Higher-education reforms in Italy in the 2000s

Academic 1999/ 2000/1 2001/2 2002/3 2003/4 2004/5 2005/6

(1997): from 39 per cent in the academic year 1999/2000 to 43 per

participation among lower-class students in 2015 than in 2002’ (2017,

its intention to address the so-called problem of ‘severe underfunding

and Research (MUIR) (1993–8), behind autonomy there was “a