CGHE Webinar 366

Higher education and public good: The case of the UK

Date: Thursday, 29 June 2023 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Location: Zoom webinar, registration required

Speaker(s):

Simon Marginson, University of Oxford and University of Bristol

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In Anglophone jurisdictions policy highlights the private goods associated with higher education, especially salary levels and rates of employment, but largely neglects goods not measured as economic values (public goods), including non-pecuniary individual benefits and collective social outcomes. Governments are largely silent on the importance and the funding of public goods. The paper reports on a study of understandings of the public good role of higher education in the UK, primarily England, part of a cross-national comparison of 11 countries. The study included review of selected ‘watershed’ policy reports and 24 semi-structured interviews in contrasting universities (13) and among policy makers, national organisations, and experts on higher education (11).

The study found that the UK now has no policy language for talking about outcomes of higher education other than individualised economic benefits, research impact, knowledge exchange and widening participation (access to education as a private good). Awareness of multiple public goods has been suppressed to justify successive fee increases and the English market model. Nearly all interviewees, including policy makers and advisers, pushed back against this, and provided examples of public goods in higher education, though the concepts lacked rigour and clarity. The policy notion of a zero-sum split of private and public outcomes (the more private is higher education, the less it is public), reflecting economic models of the split of private/public costs, was rejected by the interviewees in favour of an additive relation of private/public.

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Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education with emeritus status at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in China and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne in Australia, and also Joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. Simon was the founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), which he led between 2015 and 2024. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods. With Lili Yang, Simon co-authored a 2022 paper ‘Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches’ which found that if the Anglophone economic notion of a zero-sum trade-off between public goods and private goods is removed, then the full range of higher education’s contributions emerge and the two systemic approaches to the public good role are compatible despite differences in the respective political cultures. Simon’s most recent book, authored with CGHE researcher Vassiliki Papatsiba of Cardiff University, is Brexit, EU students and UK higher education: Broken bridges, published by Bloomsbury Academic in August 2025. Forthcoming, also from CGHE research, are The future of cross-border academic mobility and immobility: Power, knowledge and agency, edited by Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery and Ravinder Sidhu (Bloomsbury Academic, December 2025); and the sole authored Simon Marginson, Global higher education in times of upheaval: On common goods, geopolitics and decolonisation (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2026). All three of these books are available for free download on an Open Access basis with the support of UKRI. You can contact Simon at simon.marginson@bristol.ac.uk or simon.marginson@education.ox.ac.uk