Education

International
Research

Higher Education Funding

across the Globe
An Overview on Funding of Higher
and Further Education and Research,
its Political and Socio-Economic Causes,
and some Consequences, across the Globe

Julian Garritzmann
on behalf of Education International
May 2024
About the author:

Julian Garritzmann
is Professor of Political Science at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.
He specializes on the politics of higher education and other social
investment policies. The over-arching topic of his research is how
countries reform their education and welfare systems in response to the
transition from industrial to post-industrial knowledge economies.

Julian holds a PhD in political science from the University of Konstanz,

Germany. Before joining Frankfurt, he was Senior Researcher at the
University of Zurich, Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, Duke
University, and at Rutgers, as well as a max Weber Fellow at the
European University Institute in Firenze, Italy.

Julian’s publications include 5 books with leading university presses and

20 papers in internationally renowned political science and sociology
journals. Most important in the present context is his book on the
Political Economy of Higher Education Finance. His work has been
awarded with awards by the American, the German, and the Swiss
Political Science Associations. While his training has mostly focused on
the wealthy OECD democracies, his most recent work has increasingly
taken a global perspective, comparing countries around the globe.

[email protected]

About Education International:

Education International represents organisations of teachers and other

education employees across the globe. It is the world’s largest federation of
unions and associations, representing thirty million education employees
in about four hundred organisations in one hundred and seventy countries
and territories, across the globe. Education International unites teachers
and education employees.
 Education
International
Research

Higher Education Funding

across the Globe
An Overview on Funding of Higher
and Further Education and Research,
its Political and Socio-Economic Causes,
and some Consequences, across the Globe

Julian Garritzmann
on behalf of Education International
May 2024

This work is licensed under a Creative Published by Education International - May 2024
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 4.0 International License. ISBN 978-92-9276-006-9(PDF)
(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Cover picture credits: Getty Images/iStockphoto

 Education International Research
Higher Education Funding across the Globe

Executive Summary

This paper offers an overview on funding of higher and further education

across the globe. Drawing on the best available comparative data, it shows
how education is funded in different ways. It discusses, for example, how
much different countries spend on higher education, how spending has
changed over time, how high tuition fees and financial student aid are, and to
what extent performance-criteria are applied to allocate funding. Moreover,
the paper summarises state-of-the-art knowledge on the causes and
consequences of these differences, pointing at the political dynamics behind
education funding and the far-reaching consequences. The paper offers the
following main take-aways:

• A lot of data exists on education funding. Yet, the data quality

is higher (and there is more information available) for the
wealthy OECD democracies than for the rest of the world.
• Education spending is at the same time a very simple and a very
complex phenomenon. On the one hand, numbers are very easy
to compare, much easier than other dimensions of education such
as didactical styles, teaching contents, or the like. On the other
hand, the devil is in the details, as funding is a highly complex and
technical field. Understanding some of these details is crucial, though,
in order to understand the consequences (e.g. on inequalities) as
well as the political dynamics around higher education funding.
• On average, governments around the globe spend 0.83
per cent of their GDP on higher education. Average public
spending on higher education has increased in countries
around the globe. Globally, the amounts spent on higher
education have almost doubled between 2006 and 2018.
• At the same time, there are massive differences across countries.
Generally speaking, countries in Nordic Europe and North America
spend the highest amounts on higher education, while the lowest
amounts are found in (Sub-Saharan) Africa and South East Asia.
• Historically, Europe and North America have spent the most on
higher education; more recently, (South) East Asia is “catching
up”, but most of these spending increases are driven by increases
in student numbers. When we look at the amounts spent per
higher education student, Europe and North America, as well
as Oceania, clearly outspend every other region. Moreover, we
find the largest increases in these “high-spending” countries.

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• There is change over time, but most changes are incremental

rather than radical, and spending is path dependent.
• Most of the money is spent on staff, but there are large country
differences. There appears to be a relationship between
funding and staff numbers, but we lack strong research to
answer to what extent these relationships are causal.
• Private higher education funding plays a major role in some countries
but none in others. Private spending is particularly high in North
America and parts of Latin America and North East Asia; in most of
Europe, especially Nordic Europe, private spending is negligible.
• There are large differences in how much countries spend on research
and development (R&D). Generally speaking, those countries that
spend much on higher education also spend high amounts on R&D.
• Private R&D spending is (much) higher than
public R&D spending in most countries.
• Public R&D spending (relative to GDP) has been constant
over the last 40 years in most countries – it has neither
decreased nor increased. Private R&D spending (relative
to GDP) has increased a lot in several countries.
• Three groups of factors explain the variation in higher education
funding: political actors (especially governing parties, unions,
and employers); socio-economic factors (such as economic
growth, technological change, or labour market change);
and institutional factors (such as the political system).
• How exactly higher education is funded has large consequences
on many important social, economic, and political phenomena, for
example on wage inequality, gender inequality, educational inequality,
economic growth, youth unemployment, and patterns of innovation.

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary I
Table of Contents III
Outline and coverage of this report 1
A comparative analysis of education and research funding across countries and
trends over time 3
A trade-off between generalisation and detail 3
Public higher education spending in countries across the globe 4
Which governmental level is responsible for higher education funding? 6
Changes in public higher education funding? 8
What is the public higher education funding spent on? 14
Is it all performance-based now? 18
Private higher education funding 19
R&D expenditure 23
What explains variation in (public) education funding? A brief summary of what we
know about the political, economic, and social causes 26
Socio-economic factors 26
Actors 28
Institutions & path dependencies 31
So, what are favorable conditions for public spending on higher education? 32
Does education funding matter? A brief summary of what we know about the
consequences of education funding on inequalities and employment/staff 33
Funding and employment in academia 34
Conclusion & recommendations for future research 40
References 42
Appendix 47

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Table of Figures and Tables

Figure 1. A typology of different types of higher education funding 5

Figure 2. Map of government expenditure on tertiary education as a share of GDP 6

Figure 3. Government expenditure on tertiary education as a share of GDP 7

Figure 4. Public tertiary education expenditure (including R&D) by level of government

(after fiscal transfers between levels), in 2020. 8

Figure 5. Total public spending on higher education by world region, 2006-2018

(in billions of 2018 US-$, power purchasing parity) 9

Figure 6. Total public spending on higher education per higher education student by world
region, 2006 and 2019 (in thousands of 2018 US-$, power purchasing parity) 10

Figure 7. Public tertiary education expenditure as a share of GDP, 1970-2022,

in a selection of 16 representative countries. 12

Figure 8. Percentage change in total tertiary education spending per student 2019-2020 13

Figure 9. Share of current higher education expenditure on staff (teachers or others)

and other expenditure in 2019 15

Figure 10. Financial student aid as a share of GDP in the “Global North” and “Global South”,
2006-2018 16

Figure 11. Public spending on financial student aid as a share of GDP and as a share of total
public higher education expenditure 17

Table 1. A simple typology of types of performance-based funding criteria and some

examples of typically used tools 18

Figure 12. Shares of tertiary education expenditure by government,

households, other private entities, and non-domestic sources. 20

Table 2. Average annual tuition fees (in US-$, PPP) for national students in 2019/20. 21

Figure 13. The Four Worlds of Student Finance: Tuition fees and subsidies. 23

Figure 14. Gross domestic expenditure on R&D by government and

business sector as a share of GDP, in most recent year (2019, 2020, or 2021) 24

Figure 15. Gross domestic expenditure on R&D by government and

business sector as a share of GDP, 1980-2020. 25

Figure 16. Average number of academic staff in up to 228 countries

around the globe, 1975-2015. 35

Figure 17. Percentage change in the number of academic staff

and number of students, 2000-2015 36

Figure 18. Academic staff by seniority level, 2020. 37

Table 3. Share of academic staff in higher education (ISCED 5-8)

working part-time, 2013-2021. 39

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Outline and coverage of this report

Education and skills are the crucial backbone of today’s post-industrial

knowledge economies. Education and knowledge have several positive
consequences for individuals as well as for societies and economies. On the
individual level, we know that more educated people tend to earn higher
wages (Mincer 1958), are less likely to be unemployed and more likely
to be employed in good working conditions (Breen & Jonsson 2005), are
politically and socially more engaged (Mettler 2002), live healthier lives – and
accordingly also live longer (DeWalt et al. 2004). On the country level, we
know that more educated societies tend to have stronger economic growth
(Barro 2001), more innovative economies, and more coherent, less polarised
societies (Green et al. 2006) – to name but some of the “merits” of education.
Accordingly, funding of education and research is a key element of
countries’ economic and social well-being and a key objective of countries’
governments. Yet, there are enormous differences in how countries around
the globe fund education and research. This report offers a systematic
overview of education and research funding, focusing on the level of higher
education and further education as well as on research funding. Given data
availability, most of this report focuses on higher education and research
funding – much less data is available for further education, arguably not least
because further education has quite different meanings in different country
contexts, making it much harder to compare.
The report is structured as follows. Using the best available indicators and
most recent data, the next section provides a descriptive overview on the
different ways countries fund higher and further education, focusing also
on changes over time. Particular emphasis is placed on some of the most
recent changes during the so-called “poly-crisis”, i.e. a time when several
crises happen simultaneously or shortly after each other, such as in Europe
the 2007 Financial Crises followed by the Great Recession of the late 2000s,
the so-called “Refugee crisis” in the mid-2010s triggered by rising refugee
numbers and a radicalized political discourse, the Covid-19 pandemic, and
the “Russia Crisis” with its war in Ukraine.
A plethora of data on education funding exists thanks to efforts by several
international organisations like the OECD, the World Bank, the EU/Eurydice,
and UNESCO. High-quality, fine-grained data is especially available for the
OECD democracies. While by now data is also available for a wide range
of other countries, the data is much less fine-grained and the data quality
more questionable. Accordingly, there is a certain trade-off between wide
geographical coverage and detail. This report tries to make the best of this
data situation by using all these different data sources, offering a worldwide
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comparison on more general indicators as well as a more fine-grained

analysis of the high-income OECD countries.
After having laid out the main patterns in funding of higher and further
education, Section 3 of this report asks how these differences can be
explained. What causes variation in education funding? Drawing on a
large body of political and social science research, three main groups of
explanations are presented, focusing on:

1. socio-economic factors (e.g., demographic ageing or globalisation);

2. political and economic actors (e.g., political parties,
trade unions, or employer associations); and
3. institutional settings (e.g., the type of political and economic system).

The way education and research are funded has large-scale consequences.
Section 4 of this report sketches some of these consequences, summarising
some of the key insights that economists, sociologists, political scientists, and
education scholars have produced on this topic. We will see, for example,
how the type of education funding is related to patterns of educational and
socio-economic inequalities, chances of upward mobility, and academic
research output. The report’s final section concludes by pointing at a number
of blind spots and “black boxes” that future work needs to address.

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A comparative analysis of education

and research funding across countries
and trends over time

A trade-off between generalisation and detail

This section offers an overview of funding of higher and further education

and research across countries, focusing also on trends over time. Before
delving into the empirics, a note of caution is necessary. At first sight,
education funding appears to be a simple phenomenon: it’s the money
that is spent on education. A closer look reveals, though, a high degree of
complexity. Even if we focus “only” on funding of higher and further education,
there is a complex pattern of money flows. Figure 1 illustrates this – but even
this typology is far from painting a complete picture of the complexity of
education funding.
To start with, education funding comes from different sources, including
public and private spenders. Delving deeper, there are several kinds of
public sources, including the nation state’s central governments, as well
as – often several layers of – subnational governments, sometimes also
supranational actors. In Germany, for example, besides the German national
government there is the regional level (Länder), the local level (Kommunen
and Gemeinden), as well as the supranational EU-level. National, subnational,
and supranational levels can be simultaneously engaged in education
funding, creating a complex web that sometimes even experts find hard to
disentangle. This report will mostly focus on the national level of countries,
but also shed some light on subnational variation. Regarding private
education funding, we need to distinguish money spent by individual persons
or households from money spent by companies; the former mainly includes
tuition fees, but also donations (e.g. “philanthropy”), the latter includes
companies’ investment in their workers’ skills as well as in research and
development.
Going further, money can be spent in many different ways. Public higher
education funding, for example, can be spent directly on higher education
institutions or it can be spent on students and their households as financial
student aid. Each of these types of spending again can come in many
forms, for example financial student aid can come as unconditional grants,
as subsidised and guaranteed loans, or as tax deductions – to mention

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just some examples. Money can also be allocated in different ways and
following different criteria; for example, funding can be performance-based
(depending on certain input or output criteria), be offered as project-funding,
as lump sums, and be distributed according to other formulas. What might
sound like technical details in fact has important consequences. Whether
funding is offered as grants or loans, for example, has crucial implications for
equality of opportunity and upward mobility, as children from lower socio-
economic families are much more likely to be incentivised to study by grants
rather than loans (cf. Garritzmann 2016).
The following overview and graphs are thus necessarily simplified and can
only highlight some of the main patterns. They should be read like a “map”
that offers guidance by simplifying reality. Accordingly, I will also focus on the
main patterns in the data and not try to describe each and every country’s
situation in detail.

Public higher education spending in countries across the globe

Let us start by looking at the most general and fundamental indicator:

the amounts spent by governments on tertiary education. Given that
countries vary a lot in their economic power and number of students, the
total amounts are not very informative. The following analysis thus sets the
numbers in relation to countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) to account
for economic power, in relation to purchasing power parity to make them
comparable across contexts and over time, and/or in relation to the number
of students to account for differences in the size of the student population.
Figure 3 shows public expenditure on tertiary education as a share of GDP
for 123 countries, i.e. for all countries where data is available in the UNESCO
dataset1 (readers interested in single countries find the same data in Table
A1 in the Appendix). For most countries the data describes the year 2020,
for some it is even more recent, or slightly before when the data for 2020
was unavailable. There are three main takeaways from Figures 2 and 3. First,
the mean value is 0.83, meaning that on average countries around the globe
spend less than one percent of their GDP on tertiary education. While there
is no absolute and objective criterion to say whether this is “a lot” or “little”,
this is clearly below the targets stated by some stakeholders like student
unions, teacher unions, or international organisations, to spend at least 1
(or 2) percent of GDP on higher education. Second, as the Figure illustrates,
there is huge variation across countries, ranging from 0.02% (in Fiji) to well
above 2 percent (in Norway and Denmark) and even an outlier of 3.35% in
Sierra Leone. Third, a closer look reveals clear patterns in the data: Most of
the “high-spending” countries (values above 1%) are European and North
American countries, especially countries in Northern Europe; some Latin

1 http://data.uis.unesco.org/
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Tax deduction Universal

Need-based
Grants
Directly
to Higher Merit-based
Education
Institutions Family
allowances

Publicly subsidized
Central,
regional, local Loans
governments Publicly
guarantedd

Repayability
conditions
Not
performance-
Financial based
student aid Research-focused
Performance-
based
Teaching-focused
Public

Social impact-
based

Higher
education Up-front vs
funding deferred
Tuition fees
Universal vs
Households differentiated
Donation /
philanthropy Income-
contingent

Private 1st vs 2nd

cycle

Subject-
R&D spending specific

Type-A
Donations / vs Type-B
Companies Higher
Contributions
Education
Institutions
Education-related
taxation

Figure 1. A typology of different types of higher education funding

Source: Garritzmann 2023: 123

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American countries (e.g., Chile, Costa Rica, Bolivia) and some Asian countries
and territories also stand out (e.g., India, Macao). We hardly find African
and South East Asian countries among the top-spenders. Most of these
countries appear at the bottom of the distribution, spending very minor
amounts on tertiary education. While there are some noteworthy exceptions,
we generally see a clear pattern where the rich “Western” countries spend
higher proportions on tertiary education than countries in other world
regions. Zooming in on the rich “Western” economies, we see that spending
is particularly high in Nordic Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries (US,
Canada, UK); the amounts spent are lower in Continental Europe and even
lower still in Southern Europe and several of the richer Latin American
countries.

Figure 2. Map of government expenditure on tertiary education as a share of GDP

Source: Own depiction based on UNESCO data, the data describes the year 2020 (+/- 2 years depending on data
availability, accessed 27. September 2023

Which governmental level is responsible for higher education funding?

In many countries political authority does not lie only at the national/central
level; rather, sub-national political layers can also exist. In these so-called
“multilevel governance systems” authority over (higher) education can be
decentralised to lower levels, e.g. the regional or local level, or even to the
level of individual higher education institutions. This is the case in several
federal countries (e.g. Germany, the USA, Switzerland), but also in several
non-federal but decentralised states (cf. Garritzmann et al. 2021 for an
overview). In order to understand the funding dynamics well, we just need to
know which governmental level is the main spender.

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Figure 3. Government expenditure on tertiary

education as a share of GDP
Source: Own depiction based on UNESCO data, the data describes the year
2020 (+/- 2 years depending on data availability); http://data.uis.unesco.org/
index.aspx?queryid=3865#; accessed 27 September 2023.

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Figure 4 shows data on this for the OECD countries, where disaggregation
into the central/national, regional, and local level is possible. Figure 4 shows
that for most of the countries the central level is not only the most important,
but also the only public funder of higher education. There are some
countries, though, where the main spending level is the regional level. This
is especially the case in some – but not all – of the federal states (Belgium,
Germany, Switzerland, and partly in the USA and Brazil), but also in some
unitary states (Italy, France) and in semi-federal Spain. In most countries,
however, the national level clearly is most important, thereby also justifying
a focus on this level in this report. The local level is negligible in all countries
where we have data.

Figure 4. Public tertiary education expenditure (including R&D) by level of

government (after fiscal transfers between levels), in 2020.
Source: Own depiction, based on OECD (2023) Education at a Glance data, Table C4.2.

Changes in public higher education funding?

How has public spending on tertiary education changed over time? Has it
increased, decreased, or stagnated? Globally, there is a clear trend towards
more spending on higher education, in line with the notion that we develop
towards a global “knowledge economy”. Figure 5 shows the changes in total
public spending amounts on higher education between 2006 and 2018,
adjusted in purchasing power parity (PPP) so that they can be compared
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across countries and time. Globally, the amounts spent on higher education
have almost doubled between 2006 and 2018. Thus, governments spend
more and more public money on higher education. Below the surface of this
general trend towards higher spending, there are large differences between
world regions: from a global perspective, Europe and North America are
still the group spending the largest share, but their relative global share has
decreased from 60% in 2006 to 49% in 2018 (UNESCO 2022: 31). The largest
increases appear in (South) East Asia. This region’s share of the total global
spending has increased from 17% in 2006 to 25% in 2018 (ibid.). In terms
of public higher education funding, (South) East Asia is catching up with the
“West”.

Figure 5. Total public spending on higher education by world region, 2006-2018 (in
billions of 2018 US-$, power purchasing parity)
Source: Figure reproduced from UNESCO (2022: 31) Higher Education Global Data Report

These numbers look somewhat differently, though, as soon as we set them

in relation to the number of students in these regions (Figure 6). When we
look at the amounts spent per higher education student, Europe and North
America, as well as Oceania, clearly outspend every other region. Moreover,
we find the largest increases in these “high-spending” countries in Europe
and North America. But (South) Eastern Asia is also increasing its position
in this respect. In other world regions, we see stagnation or even decreases
(in Oceania and Latin America and the Caribbean). Thus, it is especially the
countries that already spend high per-capita amounts on higher education

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that have increased their spending further, while countries in regions with
lower spending have not increased or even decreased their amounts. Taken
together, Figures 5 and 6 thus show that most of the spending increases
in the non-“Western” countries can be attributed to them widening their
higher education participation, not (mainly) by spending higher amounts per
students. Put differently, while the non-“Western” countries are currently
undergoing a large-scale expansion of higher education (towards “mass-
education” systems), the “Western” countries underwent this massification
earlier and – while enrollment levels are still growing – focus on increasing
the quality of higher education by spending larger amounts per student.
Again, there is a lot of variation also within these broader country groups (cf.
e.g. OECD (2022) Education at a Glance 2022, Figure C1.3).

Figure 6. Total public spending on higher education per higher education student by
world region, 2006 and 2019 (in thousands of 2018 US-$, power purchasing parity)
Source: UNESCO (2022) Higher Education Global Data Report

Broad global comparisons like these are interesting and reveal important
global shifts, but they brush over a lot of intra-regional variation. To get
a closer look at this, Figure 7 zooms in on 16 countries that arguably can
be regarded as representatives of the different world regions, which are
also characterised by different kinds of education and welfare systems
(Garritzmann et al. 2022a, 2022b). In America, Canada represents the
liberal welfare states of North America, Argentina and Brazil the large and
rather wealthy Latin American countries, Peru the less advantaged Latin
American countries. In Europe, Sweden represents the social democratic
Nordic European welfare states, Germany the conservative continental
Europe welfare tradition, Italy the particularistic Southern European welfare
system, Estonia is chosen for the Baltics’ liberal welfare states, and Poland
for the Visegrád group with their so-called dependent market economies
and layered welfare system. China and India are chosen as the two Asian
“mega-states”, Japan represents the comparatively wealthy North East Asian

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countries with their productivist welfare tradition and Indonesia exemplifies

South East Asia. For Africa, I selected Egypt for the North and Ghana and
Kenya as two large states in the middle of the geographical, but also income
distribution in Africa.
For some countries, data on spending as a share of GDP is available already
since the 1970s so that we can also investigate changes over the longer
term. Doing so is important, because spending might be volatile during
certain years (e.g. during crises) so looking at single years or short periods of
time might distort our view (see the discussion on Figure 8 below)2. Figure 7
shows a number of interesting facts. Let me highlight three. First of all, in
many countries there is rather little change even over this long period of 50
years. While the lines are not flat, they are very slowly moving, indicating a
lot of stability. It is not the case that we see large expansions or decreases in
spending here. This phenomenon is well known among scholars of budgetary
processes where the best predictor of next year’s budget usually is last year’s
budget. Political scientists have offered a number of explanations for this
continuity, the most important one referring to so-called “path dependencies”
(Pierson 2000), as explained below in the section on explanations for the
spending patterns.
A second noteworthy fact is that while change is happening very slowly, there
are systematic observable changes in the data. Most importantly, we see – as
already highlighted in the figures above – an increase in public spending in
most countries in most years. While the spending amounts are usually not
radically increased, the trends point upwards, indicating that countries spend
an increasing share of their wealth on higher education. There are also some
noteworthy exceptions to this pattern, though, especially Canada (where we
witness a gradual decline in spending), but also some retrenchment periods
particularly in the three African states. More generally, the trends are less
volatile in the richer countries and fluctuate more in less wealthy economies.
Third, changes apart, we once again see rather large differences across
countries, as discussed above. The Western and Northern European
countries (particularly Sweden) and Canada (despite the declining trend)
stand out with comparatively high spending levels; spending levels are much
lower in Southern and Eastern Europe, in most of Asia (beside the recent rise
in India), Africa, and Latin America (despite some catching-up tendencies).

2 For example, when we analyse the data in relation to countries’ GDP (to account for
differently strong economies), these shares might change not because of changes
in education spending but because of changes in the GDP. If, for example, there
was a sudden decline in GDP but education spending remained constant, this
would appear as an “increase”, although in reality no change might be noticeable for
students, educators, and other stakeholders in the education systems.
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Figure 7. Public tertiary education expenditure as a share of GDP, 1970-2022, in a

selection of 16 representative countries.
Source: Own compilation based on UNESCO data.

Figure 8 highlights another aspect of the data by zooming in on the most

recent changes in the data, i.e. the changes between 2019 and 2020, using
the most recent data published by the OECD in September 2023. A focus on
these most recent changes is interesting especially as the Covid-19 pandemic
started to hit most countries in late 2019 and 2020, which obviously also
had large-scale implications for the provision of education, which in many
countries moved to a virtual environment (at least for some time).
Figure 8 shows that between 2019 and 2020, the OECD countries on average
decreased tertiary education spending, which might have been due to the
fact that priorities shifted to other areas (health care, health prevention, a
focus on school education, etc.). In most countries, the changes are, however,
rather small. Yet, there are also some more extreme changes, showing
increases or decreases of up to 20 percent. These are very significant
changes. When interpreting this data, though, a note of caution is in order:
when focusing on the analysis of single changes, we always risk drawing
incorrect or misleading conclusions. As highlighted in Figure 7, the long-term
perspective often reveals quite a different picture than a narrower focus on
single years indicates. This should be kept in mind when interpreting Figure 8.
More concretely: Figure 8 shows that we saw the largest spending increases
in Lithuania, Slovenia, the Slovak Republic, and Canada, partly exceeding 10
percent. This is quite impressive. What the figure does not show, though,
is that the Slovak Republic, Lithuania, and others had considerably cut
spending right before 2019, which puts these changes in perspective (see
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the comparison of the 2015-2019 data in OECD’s 2022 Education at a glance

report Figure C4.3). Moreover, Canada’s recent increase should be seen
against the background of its previous constant decreasing spending trend
that we saw in Figure 7. Vice versa, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Romania, and
Israel have shown the largest spending cuts in 2020 – but once again, this
brushes over trends before this year: for example, the Czech Republic and
Mexico had increased their spending amounts for many years and only show
decreases very recently, whereas Israel shows a constant decreasing trend
for more than 20 years already, and Romania an “inverse U-shaped” trend
first with increases until 2008 then subsequent decreases since the Great
Recession. In short, we should only very carefully draw conclusions from
short-term changes such as the one in Figure 8. While it might be somewhat
disappointing and frustrating, we will simply have to wait for more data to be
published to see to what extent these changes are durable.

Figure 8. Percentage change in total tertiary education spending

per student 2019-2020
Source: OECD Education at a Glance 2023: Table C1.3

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What is the public higher education funding spent on?

So far, we have focused on public higher education spending in general. An

important subsequent question is what this money is spent on. This is crucial
because the very same amount of money can be spent in many different
ways (e.g. on buildings, teachers, financial student aid, or research), resulting
in quite different consequences (e.g. different patterns of inequality).
To start with, we can analyse what exactly the public money spent on higher
education institutions is used for. The OECD data allows differentiating
between “current” expenditure (in this fiscal year) and “capital” expenditure
(referring to investments with longer time horizons than the current fiscal
year). The latter category is mainly driven by the construction of new
buildings (e.g. in response to enrollment expansions or new research
facilities) or the restoration of existing facilities. Empirically, in all countries,
more than 90% of the money is in the “current” category, which is why I
focus on this in the following. Over time, there is little variation in this ratio
on average, but some variation related to changes in the student population
(OECD 2022: 320). Current expenditure can then again be differentiated
between spending on staff (teachers and non-teaching staff, respectively) and
on other expenditures (e.g. meals, teaching materials, maintenance of school
buildings, rental of facilities, and the like).
Figure 9 shows the empirical patterns. The black columns show the share
of non-staff expenditure, the rest is spent on staff (teaching staff and other
staff). As data for some countries was missing on what kind of staff the
money was spent on, some columns do not add up to a hundred; but we
can still see what share is spent on staff vs. other expenses. Figure 9 shows
that in all countries more money is spent on staff than on other expenses.
On average, 67 percent is spent on staff – this is lower than the 78 percent
spent on staff in non-tertiary education (not shown in the figure, but see
OECD [2022: 312]), which is mainly due to higher costs of facilities and
equipment in higher education. There is not much change in this ratio over
time (OECD 2022: 314) and the ratios are rather similar in public and private
institutions on average even if there are some country differences (OECD
2022: 315), but there is quite some variation across countries in how large
the share going to staff is. In Greece, France, and Belgium, more than 80
percent of the public money is spent on staff; in Chile, Italy, and the Czech
Republic the relationship is almost 50-50. We find especially countries of
North East Asia, Latin America, North America, and Nordic Europe in the
group spending a large share on non-staff expenses. These are also the
countries that generally appear among the top-spenders in total, as we saw
above. There are probably several reasons for this finding, but one is that
the high-spenders might be offering more services (e.g. spending more on
support services and ancillary services such as meal programs). In order to
better understand these dynamics, though, one would need to delve deeper

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into the countries’ financial accounting, which goes beyond the scope of this
overview paper.
Another interesting fact that Figure 9 reveals is that the respective share
going to teaching staff (i.e. “personnel whose primary assignment is
teaching or research [excluding student teachers, teachers’ aides and
paraprofessionals]”, cf. OECD [2022: 321]) and non-teaching staff (i.e. “other
pedagogical, administrative, and professional personnel as well as support
personnel”, cf. OECD [2022: 321]) also varies across countries: in Austria, the
share going to non-teaching staff is below 10 percent, while it is around 40
percent in the Baltic countries, and above 60 percent in Luxembourg. There
might be systematic differences behind these differences, for example that
some countries offer more non-teaching related services. But some of this
variation might simply be explained by differences in accounting practices,
e.g. the degree to which countries count staff like principals, guiding
counsellors, or others as “teaching” or “non-teaching” (cf. OECD 2022: 315).
This is even harder to distinguish in tertiary education (with its complex
and intertwined dynamics of teaching, research, and administration) than
in primary and secondary education. Thus, one should interpret the data
carefully.

Figure 9. Share of current higher education expenditure on staff (teachers or others)

and other expenditure in 2019

Source: Own depiction, based on OECD (2022) Education at a Glance 2022, Table C6.2.

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Another important piece of information is how much money is spent

directly on higher education institutions and how much is spent on financial
student aid. This matters, as different kinds of spending have very different
distributive effects (see Section 4 below). Student aid can come in many
forms, including grants, loans, tax deductions (to students or their families),
family allowances, tuition waivers, meals, housing, public transportation, and
several others (see also Figure 1). Focusing on the more general patterns
from a global perspective first, a report by the Canadian think-tank Higher
Education Strategy Associates (2022) distinguishes between countries of the
“Global North” and “Global South” and shows that countries of the “Global
North” on average spend higher amounts on financial student aid than
countries of the “Global South”, in line with the generally higher spending on
higher education in these countries we observed above in Figure 3. Figure
10 shows that the shares relative to GDP are about five times larger in the
“Global North”. In the “Global South” we see slowly increasing rates, though,
while the trends in the “Global North” rather point downwards, especially
after the Great Recession.

Figure 10. Financial student aid as a share of GDP in the “Global North”
and “Global South”, 2006-2018
Source: Figure reproduced from Higher Education Strategy Associates (2022: 81).

Zooming in on the rich OECD economies, we see quite some variation

within this broader cluster. We can look at the amounts spent on student
aid either as a share of GDP or as a share of total public higher education
funding and both times find the same country grouping (see Figure 11). It is
especially countries of Nordic Europe as well as the Anglo-Saxon countries

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that spend more on student aid; spending is much lower in the conservative
Continental European welfare states, and even lower in Southern Europe,
North East Asia, and Latin America (cf. Garritzmann 2023: 128 for details).
As emphasised below, it is important to interpret this data with reference
to the respective level of tuition fees, though, as these are substantial in the
Anglo-Saxon countries, in North East Asia, and parts of Latin America, and
comparatively low or even non-existent in Nordic and Continental Europe.
Looking at other indicators, e.g. the share of students benefiting from
student aid or the generosity of these benefits creates a similar result (cf.
also Figure 13 below). Readers interested in even more detail can find fine-
grained data for the OECD countries in the respective “Education at a Glance”
reports and the EU’s “Eurydice” reports. Elsewhere, in my book “The Political
Economy of Higher Education Finance” (Garritzmann 2016) I discuss financial
student aid (and tuition fees) in length, offering fine-grained descriptive
analysis as well as an explanation for these differences, pointing at the crucial
role of political parties that dominated the respective countries during the
1950s-80s (see also Section 3 in this paper below).

Figure 11. Public spending on financial student aid as a share of GDP

and as a share of total public higher education expenditure
Source: Own depiction based on Garritzmann 2016: Figure 2.4.

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Is it all performance-based now?

As a final aspect of the way public money is spent, I want to focus on

whether money on higher education (in terms of teaching and research) is
spent according to some performance criteria or in some other way (e.g.
as block grants, line-item budgets, or project-specific funding). So-called
“performance-based funding” has recently become a “hot topic” in political
discourses, although the actual phenomenon is already much older. There
is an ongoing (largely theoretical and normative) discussion on the pros and
cons of performance-based funding (e.g., OECD 2020: Section 4.5). While
some empirical studies exist, most of these focus on variation within the USA
and on some European countries (Jongbloed et al. 2023).
Empirically, the share of funding distributed according to performance
criteria is estimated to vary quite remarkably across countries: it likely is
about 85% in Denmark, 76% in Finland, 55% in Austria, 30% in Italy, 26%
in the Netherlands, ca. 15% in Poland (Jongbloed et al. 2023) – but we
lack precise systematic empirical information on this; we even more lack
information on changes over time. Otherwise, block grants without ear-
marked criteria are common, but project-specific funding is also increasingly
important (ibid.).
More specifically, several performance-criteria are common. Some are
quantitative, focusing on inputs, activity, outputs, or outcomes, such as the
number of degrees awarded, graduate employment, number of awarded
PhDs; some are qualitative, focusing on periodic peer-review reports.
Table 1 offers a schematic typology to systematise the different kinds of
performance-based approaches.

Table 1. A simple typology of types of performance-based funding criteria and some

examples of typically used tools

Inputs Activity Outputs Outcomes

e.g. number of
degrees awarded;
e.g., number of number of
enrolled students; peer-reviewed
number of foreign e.g., number of publications; sum
e.g., graduates’
Quantitative students; ratio courses offered; of external third-
employment;
of students in number of ECTS party funding;
indicators students’ evaluation
Bachelor and credits taken by bibliometric
or feedback
Master; number students indicators; R&D-
of disadvantaged related intellectual
students property rights;
gender-equality of
academic staff

Qualitative e.g. peer-review

report on
assessments academic output

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Private higher education funding

So far, this report has focused on public spending. Yet, private higher
education expenditure also plays a crucial role in some contexts. The two
main forms of private higher education expenditure are money spent by
students and their families (mostly in the form of tuition fees) and money
spent by companies on their employees’ skills. Figure 12 shows for the
wealthy OECD countries with the best data availability the share of tertiary
education expenditure by governments (i.e. what this report has focused
on so far), but also of private households, other private entities, and non-
domestic sources (this latter category includes “direct international payments
to educational institutions such as research grants or other funds from
international sources paid directly to educational institutions” [OECD 2022:
274] but is empirically negligible).
We see that in most countries public funding is the dominant form of higher
education funding – and has been so for many decades (Garritzmann 2016).
In almost all countries the public share is above 50 percent; in many it is
above 70 or even above 90 percent. Public spending dominates particularly
in Nordic Europe and in Western continental Europe. In contrast, private
spending is an important funding source in North America, in North East
Asia, in the UK, and in some Latin American countries. For some technical
reasons the private shares are even somewhat underestimated (as they
e.g. include net and not gross amounts, see OECD [2022: 268] for details).
Other countries fall in-between these poles, especially those in Central and
Eastern Europe and in Southern Europe. Looking at the types of private
spending, Figure 12 shows that these are mainly made up from spending by
households, i.e. by students’ and their families’ educational expenses, mostly
in the form of tuition fees.

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Figure 12. Shares of tertiary education expenditure by government, households,

other private entities, and non-domestic sources.
Source: Own depiction based on OECD (2023) Education at a Glance data, Table C3.1

Given that tuition fees are the main form of private higher education funding,
Table 2 zooms further in on this. Table 2 shows the average annual tuition
fees (adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)) for national students in
2019/2020, differentiating further between tuition in public institutions
and private institutions, as well as between four levels of higher education
studies (ISCED 5-8). The first column in Table 2 shows the share of students
in private higher education institutions. Before interpreting this data it is
important to highlight that this data only reveals some of the empirical reality.
While Table 2 shows the average annual national averages, there is a lot of
variation around these means: in many countries tuition varies by region, by
higher education institution, by field of study, or even by individual student.
Thus, two students in the very same study program might pay quite different
amounts (cf. Garritzmann 2016).
Ignoring these details for now, let me highlight three take-aways from Table
2. First, we can distinguish two larger country groups: in some countries,
average tuition amounts are zero or rather negligible. This is the case in
Nordic Europe and Western continental Europe, confirming the patterns
observed in Figure 12. In a second group of countries, substantial tuition
amounts are due. These are the highest in the Anglo-Saxon countries,
in North East Asia, and in parts of Latin America. Here, average amounts

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between $5000 and $13000 are common – and given that these are
averages, the maximum amounts that some individuals pay are much higher,
often around $40,000 or $50,000 annually. Second, Table 2 shows that the
average tuition amounts are significantly higher in the private sector, which
usually is dependent on tuition-funding. This also implies that countries
with higher shares of private providers or trends towards more privatisation
witness higher average tuition amounts. We also find that while no tuition

Table 2. Average annual tuition fees (in US-$, PPP) for national students in 2019/20.
Source: Own compilation based on OECD (2021) Education at a Glance 2021, Table C5.1.

Public institutions Independent private institutions

% of
ISCED 8 ISCED 8
students in ISCED 5 ISCED 6 ISCED 7 ISCED 5 ISCED 6 ISCED 7
independent (Doctoral (Doctoral
(Short-cycle (BA or (MA or (Short-cycle (BA or (MA or
private or or
tertiary) equivalent) equivalent) tertiary) equivalent) equivalent)
institutions equivalent) equivalent)

Denmark 0 0 0 0 0

Estonia 8 None for full-time students in programs in Estonian 9161 10994 10994

Turkey 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Norway 10 493 0 0 0 5742 0

Sweden 10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Finland 48 0 0 0 0 0

Germany 15 148 5187

Belgium
- French 0 191 808
community

France 21 0 233 333 520

Austria 21 952 952 952

Belgium
- Flemish 0 1239 1239 1239 620
community

Spain 20 0 1768 2580 10342 11672

Italy 15 2013 2252 522 7338 9183 2747

Netherlands 2652 2652 2652

Israel 12 2753 3720 9004 10052

Hungary 5 2540 3834 8096 2717 4284 10643

Lithuania 10 4048 7947 14540 3773 5109 12332

New
10 3264 4584 5904 4931 4653 4376 6042
Zealand

Latvia 24 3221 4768 4953 6493 3221 5243 5748 6669

Korea 80 2698 4792 6157 7140 6920 8582 11506 12511

Australia 22 3428 5024 8993 208 7357 9226 12487 1623

Canada 5060 8965 5539

Japan 78 3742 5177 5173 5172 6787 8798 7832 5824

Ireland 3 8304 9667 8676

Chile 71 3766 8317 11531 9707 4137 7368 11172 8678

United
26 3313 9212 12171 15727 31875 25929
States

England
12330
(UK)

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is due in public institutions in North-Western Europe, private institutions in

these countries charge considerable fees, e.g. around $9,000 in Estonia, and
$5,000 in Germany and Norway. Third, Table 2 shows that tuition usually
increases in the more advanced study programs, i.e. average amounts in the
MA-programs exceed those of the BA-programs. While this might seem like a
technical detail, this is one of the reasons contributing to the persistence of
educational inequality, since children from lower socio-economic strata are
more likely to only study in short-term programs (see Section 4 of this report).
While tuition amounts might be high, we should always look at them in
comparison to the type of financial student aid. Thus, going one step further,
Figure 13 combines the information on average tuition amounts with some
information on financial student aid (here, the share of students benefitting
from grants or subsidised student loans). The figure shows what I have called
the “Four Worlds of Student Finance” (Garritzmann 2016). In most continental
European countries with their conservative welfare states, tuition is rather
low, but there is also rather little financial student aid: the low-tuition—low-
subsidy countries. In a second group of Nordic European countries with a
generous and inclusive welfare tradition, no tuition applies but most students
receive generous aid: the low-tuition—high-subsidy regime. In a third cluster,
tuition is high but there is also quite a lot of financial student aid available,
especially in the form of subsidised and guaranteed loans; we find this
high-tuition—high-subsidy regime in the Anglo-Saxon countries typical of
the liberal welfare state. Finally, we also find the high-tuition—low-subsidy
combination, as countries in North East Asia and parts of Latin America
charge considerable tuition amounts but hardly offer student aid.
A comparison over time (Garritzmann 2016, 2023) shows that these country
differences are highly stable. The best predictor for countries’ level of tuition
fees in today’s time is whether they had established tuition already in the
1960s-70s. Hardly any country (England being the noteworthy exception
as it introduced tuition fees in 1997 and subsequently increased them
substantially) has shifted paths: countries that charge tuition fees never
abolish these but keep increasing them, whereas countries that charge
no fees or very low amounts are very likely not to introduce any fees (for
regular students)3. This is no coincidence, but based in political dynamics,
as sketched out in Section 3 and explained in detail in Garritzmann (2016).
Accordingly, while there have been some shifts during the pandemic (e.g.
as international student mobility decreased; cf. OECD 2021: 41) this has not
structurally changed the country grouping.

3 The analysis and arguments here focus on “regular students”. There is more
variation when we take a broader view. For example, some countries (even in
tuition-free Scandinavia) have recently introduced substantial fees for students
from non-EFTA (European Free Trade Association) countries and some countries
charge students when they enroll in a program after having completed a first Master
program already.
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Figure 13. The Four Worlds of Student Finance: Tuition fees and subsidies.
Source: Author’s compilation based on OECD (2021, 2022, 2023) Education at a glance reports. Note: All data is for
the year 2019/20, except countries in grey, where there is slightly older data.

R&D expenditure

Closely related to higher and further education is a related spending

category: expenditure on research and development (R&D). Only some
of this money benefits the higher education sector, but it is an important
revenue source especially for more research-focused institutions and for
some schools of applied sciences. R&D expenditure can come from both
public and private sources. Figure 14 shows two of the main sources: gross
domestic expenditure on R&D by governments, on the one hand, and by
business enterprises, on the other hand, each as a share of GDP to facilitate
comparisons. Figure 14 shows the data for the most recent time point (the
year 2019, 2020, or 2021, depending on data availability) while Figure 15
displays the longer time trends since 1980.
Before delving into the details, a look at the scale is interesting: the average
total R&D spending across countries is almost 2 percent of GDP – a
considerable amount, especially when compared to the average amounts
spent on higher education as a share of GDP shown in Figures 3 and 7. The
average of the public spending across countries is 0.56 percent of GDP, the
companies’ R&D spending is about twice that much at 1.10 percent. Overall,
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the private sector is thus the main spender on R&D across countries. Figure
14 also reveals remarkable differences across countries, especially regarding
engagement of the private sector. While the public share varies between
0.07 and 1.12 percent of GDP, the private share lies between 0.05 and
3.75 percent and thus shows much more variation. A closer look exposes
a country grouping that we have also seen above in some of the other
data: public R&D spending is particularly high in North East Asia (especially
Korea, but also Japan) and in North-Western Europe (Scandinavia, Germany,
Switzerland, Austria). At the bottom of the list we find the Latin American
countries and most Central and Eastern European countries (except Estonia,
which spends considerably more, in line with its focus on a high-skill service
economy). Private R&D spending is also particularly high in North East Asia,
but also in the United States and Israel, and some European countries
(Germany, Belgium, Switzerland). In contrast, rather low private amounts are
spent once again in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. In a few
countries (Argentina, Chile, Greece, Latvia, Mexico, Norway, Russia, South
Africa) the public amounts even exceed the private amounts.

Figure 14. Gross domestic expenditure on R&D by government and business sector
as a share of GDP, in most recent year (2019, 2020, or 2021)
Source: Own depiction based on OECD 2023 MSTI database. Note: This data needs to be analysed with some
caution, as the definition of the spending categories differs to some degree between countries and as some values
are based on estimations (see the primary source for details).

Figure 15 allows for comparisons over time, starting for some countries as
early as 1980. Some facts appear noteworthy. First, just as with many other
types of spending (discussed above), most of the lines for R&D spending are
rather flat, indicating hardly any or only very slow change and rather strong
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path dependencies. Some countries, however, display remarkable changes,

especially in private-sector spending – the public shares have hardly changed
over the last 40 years in most countries (a noteworthy exception is South
Korea). Almost all of these countries indicate increases in spending. Upward
trends are particularly strong in North East Asia, Nordic Europe, Israel, and
the United States – as well as, more recently, in China. In Japan, for example,
the amounts doubled over the last four decades and in Korea they even
tripled. A closer look at the data (this is harder to see visually in the Figure)
shows some recent declines after the Great Recession – and some of the
countries (e.g. France, Italy, Spain) have not recovered the pre-Recession levels.

Figure 15. Gross domestic expenditure on R&D by government and

business sector as a share of GDP, 1980-2020.
Source: Own depiction based on OECD 2023 MSTI database.

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What explains variation in (public)

education funding? A brief summary
of what we know about the political,
economic, and social causes

The descriptive data presented above has revealed some considerable

country differences in funding of higher education, as well as some
interesting patterns of change (and continuity) over time. What explains this
variation? By now, a sizeable body of scholarly literature exists in political
science, sociology, and economics, exploring determinants of (public)
higher education funding. Less focus in the literature lies on determinants
of R&D funding, but some of the arguments apply equally. We can identify
three groups of explanations: socio-economic factors, political and socio-
economic actors, and institutions. Next, I briefly summarise the state-of-the-
art literature answering these questions. It is also important to mention that
most of the scholarly literature on this topic focuses on single world regions,
often either variation within the United States (across states or higher
education institutions) or the rich, established OECD democracies. There is
much less systematic work on the politics of higher education expenditure
in other regions, especially in Africa and South East Asia. In addition,
most existing work focuses on the dynamics in democracies rather than
autocracies.

Socio-economic factors

The first group of explanations points to socio-economic factors. A crucial

factor here is demographics, i.e. characteristics of countries’ population
especially with regard to age, but also other factors such as geographical
distribution (e.g. urbanisation). A main finding in the literature (e.g.
Busemeyer 2009; Iversen & Soskice 2008) is that the age structure matters:
the higher the share of young people, the higher the (public) higher
education funding. An obvious mechanism is simply demand for education.
But there are other, more indirect mechanisms as well. For example, the
older a country’s population, the more public spending is tilted towards that
age group, focusing more on pensions and health care than on education
and other investments. Pensions, in particular, thus “crowd out” social
investments like higher education. Moreover, political behavior scholars
point out that older people on average tend to vote more for conservative

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parties, thereby indirectly also affecting the party politics of higher education,
as older societies also tend to have stronger conservative parties (see next
section).
Besides demographics, countries’ economic prosperity matters. An old
theory (“Wagner’s law”) predicted that as countries grow richer, they will also
increase public expenditure, including (higher) education. Empirically, the
relationship is less straightforward (Ansell 2010; Garritzmann & Seng 2016),
not least because education can also contribute to economic prosperity. But
there is evidence that public higher education funding follows the size of the
general budget: as countries’ total budgets increase, they also spend more
on higher education (Busemeyer & Garritzmann 2017, 2018; Garritzmann &
Seng 2016).
Relatedly, countries’ public debt situation also plays a role. Several economists
(e.g., Johnstone 2011; Jongbloed 2004; Vossensteyn 2009) expected that
as public debt levels rise, budgets will be squeezed, leading to less public
spending and a shift towards private funding. Empirically, there is some
evidence for this, as private education spending tends to increase when
public debt levels are high and/or are increasing (Garritzmann 2016). More
generally, we know that in times of fiscal austerity investments are more likely
to be cut than other types of spending (Breunig & Busemeyer 2012; Jacques
2021). This is one of the main reasons why higher education funding is also
affected by socio-economic crises that challenge public budgets (like the
Great Recession or the Covid-19 pandemic).
Fourth, structural socio-economic change matters, especially the crucial
shift from industrial to post-industrial knowledge economies (Garritzmann et
al. 2022a, 2022b; Jensen 2011). As countries deindustrialise and transition
to a larger dependency on high-skill sectors, their demand for more
academic skills grows, increasing political and socio-economic demand for
more higher education funding. While this association exists empirically, it
is far from deterministic, though, as not all countries have chosen a high-
skill social investment-focused growth strategy (Garritzmann et al. 2022a,
2022b; Hassel & Palier 2021). But it helps to explain why countries that
have deindustrialised earlier and to larger extents (e.g. Nordic Europe) have
expanded their higher education enrollment rates and funding levels more
than countries with slower deindustrialisation processes (e.g. Germany,
Slovakia, or Poland).
Another “mega-trend” with crucial implications has been globalisation, i.e.
the increasing internationalised flows of goods (trade), money (finance), and
people (migration). Early optimists believed that globalisation would spread
the value and importance of (higher) education in all countries around the
globe, contributing to a liberal, democratic, peaceful “world society”. This
has not materialised. The main reason is that the relationship between
globalisation and higher education funding differs across contexts: in general,
more globalised economies tend to spend more; but more advanced
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economies tend to shift their focus towards higher education, whereas

less advanced economies shift towards a focus on primary and secondary
education to increase their respective international comparative advantages:
roughly speaking that is high-skill based production in more advanced
economies and more low-skill based production in less advanced countries
where additional skill investments might thus be (perceived as) redundant
(Ansell 2008).
Last but not least, there is an important gender aspect in higher education
funding. In most countries around the globe, women have historically
been systematically disadvantaged in their access to education and labour
markets; access to higher education was for a long time only open for boys
and men. This began to change in the 1960s and is very much related to the
expansion of the higher education sector. Since then, women have finally
been able to “catch-up” in their access to higher education. Girls and women
can and do benefit in several respects from increased (higher) education
funding. First of all, they benefit as students, as increased funding and
widened access gave them a chance to participate and to catch-up with the
historically male privilege. Second, women benefit from education spending
as mothers, because empirically in essentially all countries there has been a
gendered division between paid work (mostly male) and family work (mostly
female) in the so-called “male breadwinner model”. This began to change
with widening educational expansion, as children stayed in school longer
and started earlier (e.g. in preschools or early childhood education and care).
Third, women can benefit from increased education funding as labourers,
since the educational expansion and widening of educational enrollment
has created many jobs in the public sector that often gave career chances
to women (as males dominated the private market). Therefore, it makes
sense that public higher education funding is related to female labour force
participation, i.e. the share of women in the labour market (Busemeyer 2006,
2009), as well as to the share of women in Parliament (Iversen & Stephens
2008). To illustrate, the female labour force participation rates in Sweden has
been much higher than the ones in Southern Europe, arguably very much
related to the higher spending levels in Nordic Europe, too.

Actors

Besides socio-economic factors, political and socio-economic actors play a

crucial role in the politics of (higher) education funding. The most important
actors are political parties, trade unions (including teacher unions), employer
associations, and some interest groups and international organisations (like
the OECD or the World Bank). Student unions might also play some role, but
they remain understudied, arguably with the implicit assumption that they
are not a powerful political voice (but they might be, especially in countries
where they cover large parts of the student population).
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Governing political parties arguably are the most pivotal political actors. They
can shape and (re)design countries’ higher education policies, including
funding. One of the most established theories in political science, Power
Resource Theory, focuses on the difference between leftwing and rightwing
parties, arguing that these have different electorates and different ideologies,
which should result in different policy results: leftwing parties should favour
public education spending and oppose private funding, as education can
contribute to socio-economic upward mobility and equality of opportunity
(Castles 1989; Schmidt 2002). This might be all the more true in today’s
globalised economies where classical Keynesian demand-side policies are
increasingly infeasible for governments, shifting their focus to supply-side
policies like education (Boix 1998). Moreover, leftwing parties – at least in
the richer economies – might increasingly shift their focus to public higher
education funding, as a means to stretch electorally out to the middle class,
particularly the urban educated middle class (Busemeyer 2009).
At the same time, we know that children from more advantaged socio-
economic strata (SES) have a higher likelihood to attend higher education
than those of poorer or less educated backgrounds (Becker & Hecken
2009). High-SES children are also more likely to study in more prestigious
universities and often longer-term programs, making them the main
beneficiaries of higher education spending. Consequently, although higher
education of course can contribute to upward mobility, public higher
education spending can also reinforce or increase existing inequalities,
since tax-funded higher education is more likely to be used by higher socio-
economic groups – a pattern called “negative redistribution” or the Robin
Hood paradox. Unsurprisingly, Karl Marx (1978 [1890/91]) was one of the
first to notice and criticise this fact. Accordingly, some have argued that
political rightwing parties have a higher interest in public higher education
spending, as their traditional electorate is more likely to benefit (Jensen
2011).
This puzzle can be resolved, though, when distinguishing different kinds of
higher education funding. Over-simplifying to some degree, leftwing parties
are particularly interested in enhancing the opportunities of their electorate
to participate in higher education. Thus, they focus on policies that aim at this
goal, especially widening enrolment levels, increasing financial student aid to
disadvantaged students, and limiting or abolishing tuition fees (Garritzmann
2016). For example, the Democrats in the United States have introduced
several kinds of financial student aid to facilitate access to higher education,
such as the G.I. Bills or the Pell Grants. Similar bills have been passed under
Social Democratic leadership in Scandinavia (e.g. through generous grants,
housing allowances, and the like), as well as in Germany under the social
democratic government in the 1970s. Rightwing parties, in contrast, were
initially in favor of expanding access to higher education as it was mostly
their electorate that benefitted during the 1950s-70s (Ansell 2010), but have

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more recently shifted focus to the quality of higher education as well as to an

efficient use of money and a particular labour market focus.
Research has shown that parties were particularly powerful in the immediate
post-World War II period: The crucial period was the expansion period of
the 1950s-70s, where parties had substantial leeway in designing higher
education systems and used this to shape the systems (Garritzmann
2016). As a consequence, today’s higher education systems largely mirror
the respective partisan predominance of the 1950s-70s: where social
democrats and other left parties dominated, we see a clear focus on public
spending and inclusive higher education systems; where right-leaning parties
dominated we see a clearer focus on private expenditure and/or more
limited expansion of higher education (Garritzmann 2016). As discussed
below, parties can still shape policy today, but their political leeway for large,
transformative change has become smaller.
All of the above cited studies focus on established democracies where we
have a “programmatic linkage” between voters, parties, and policy-making.
This is less straightforward in less robust democracies or in the presence
of clientelism or corruption. In clientelist systems, the relationship between
parties and policy is different. We know, for example, that (higher) education
funding is sometimes used for clientelistic purposes in some countries, i.e. to
“buy votes” (Chen & Kitschelt 2022).
Besides parties, we know that trade unions (especially teacher unions)
and employer associations play a big role in the politics of education. For
example, we cannot understand the kind of school system and kind of
vocational education system that countries have, without paying close
attention to the “social partners” (Thelen 1999; Culpepper 2011; Busemeyer
& Trampusch 2012). There are also good reasons to expect that these actors
matter for higher education, especially as higher education has become the
crucial backbone of today’s knowledge economies. Unfortunately, though,
this link has not yet been studied empirically in a systematic way. I am not
aware of a single study that explores the influence of unions and employer
associations on higher education funding. Iversen and Stephens (2008)
come the closest to studying this, as their analysis includes a measure of
the strike intensity (“working days lost per 1000 workers”), which could be
interpreted as a measure of the strength of unions. They find that public
higher education spending tends to be higher as strike intensity grows, but
we should be careful with causal interpretation of this finding. Before coming
to another actor, it also deserves mentioning that union density is lower in
higher education institutions than in other educational institutions.
Finally, in some countries interest groups and international organisations play
an important role. A striking example are banks (and their associated lobby
groups) in countries with high tuition fees. Here, student loans can become
a lucrative business for banks, particularly when they are guaranteed and/
or subsidised by the government. In the U.S., for example, student loans
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have been a highly lucrative investment for banks, which made fortunes
handing out loans and accordingly lobbied heavily for any change in this
system (Hannah 1996; Skocpol 1997; Mettler 2009, 2010; Garritzmann 2016).
Other important actors may include international businesses like Bertelsmann,
international organisations like the OECD, IMF, or World Bank, and associations
of university presidents. A review of higher education funding in Africa, for
example, points at the systematic influence of the World Bank and other
multilateral actors (Teferra 2013). For example, the World Bank advised most
African countries to focus on primary and secondary education expansion and
funding, rather than on tertiary education (ibid.). More generally, international
organisations can matter even when they lack material resources as they
can exercise “soft power” on policy-makers (e.g. by providing information,
benchmarking countries, offering best-practice examples, or through other
means) (Bieber & Martens 2011; Vögtle et al. 2011).

Institutions & path dependencies

A third group of explanations for variation in higher education funding

points to the role of institutions. From a global perspective, the first crucial
institution is democracy. In autocracies, public spending is often targeted
towards the autocrats’ “selectorate”, i.e. people that are relevant for regime
survival. Access to education, particularly higher education, is thus not open
to all groups of society, but limited to certain groups. Accordingly, political
democratisation could also be related to a “democratisation” of access to
education. Empirically, that is indeed the case: Ansell (2008) found that the
ratio of public spending on tertiary education compared to primary education
is higher in autocratic systems – globally, democracies tend to spend more
on primary and secondary education rather than higher education, since
they seek to “democratise” access to these educational levels.
Another important institution is federalism or rather the type of multilevel
governance system, which is the technical term to describe the distribution of
political authority in countries with multiple political layers. When the power
to decide over education policy is decentralised to subnational levels, these
– rather than the national level – become relevant in deciding over higher
education funding. This is the case in many federal states, but also in some
non-federal but decentralised countries (Garritzmann et al. 2021). Research
shows that on the national and the subnational level, leftwing parties tend to
increase public higher education spending more than rightwing parties (ibid.).
But there are also some more complicated dynamics, as public spending is
higher in those regions that have the same governing parties as those on the
national level, a phenomenon called “alignment effect” (ibid.).
Finally, as mentioned already above, current policy-making is very much
shaped by policy-making in the past; that is: there are strong path

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dependencies in (higher education) funding. This is for several reasons. An

important political dynamic is that, once established, policies create so-
called “positive feedback effects” (Pierson 2000) as beneficiaries of the policy
build political support and make future retrenchment unlikely. These path
dependencies have also been identified in the case of (higher) education,
where today’s systems can be explained quite well with political decisions
made in the 1950s-70s (Garritzmann 2016; Garritzmann & Garritzmann
2023; Hearn 2001 for the U.S.). Accordingly, radical policy change is
uncommon; continuity or gradual reform is much more likely, but can come
in many forms and in the long run add up to significant change (Mahoney &
Thelen 2010).

So, what are favorable conditions for public spending on higher education?

Summarising the above discussion, we can reflect under what conditions

calls for increased public spending on higher education are most likely. The
most likely scenario is one where we have a strong and growing economy, a
relatively young population, low public debt levels and no fiscal austerity, a
focus on a high-skill post-industrial knowledge economy, leftwing parties in
office (on the national and relevant subnational levels), strong inclusive trade
unions, and a weak legacy of private investment. In contrast, public spending
on higher education is least likely to increase in the reversed scenario, i.e.
in countries with weak or declining economies, in times of recession, under
fiscal austerity and/or high public debt levels, in demographically older
societies, in countries with a heavy focus on an agrarian or an industry sector,
under conservative (or even radical right populist) governments, when unions
are weak or scattered in conflicting interests, and where there is a strong
legacy of private educational investments.

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Does education funding matter?

A brief summary of what we
know about the consequences of
education funding on inequalities
and employment/staff

The report so far has described variation in the existing higher education
funding systems and explained the causes of these differences. This final
section looks at some of the consequences, summarising state-of-the-art
research on the effects of different higher education funding systems on
(in)equality, academic output, and employment conditions. Does it matter
how higher education is funded?
The brief answer is: yes. The type of higher education funding has
considerable implications for a range of important outcomes. To start with,
a larger literature explores the implications for educational outcomes, e.g.
enrolment rates, educational inequality, study competition rates, or other
outcomes. The relationship between funding and educational outcomes
is an old topic and has become very prominent since Nobel prize winner
Heckman’s (2006) studies on investments. I focus here on some of the most
recent work that has explored whether there really is a causal link between
public education funding and outcomes. In his reviews and analyses, Jackson
(2018; Jackson et al. 2021) concluded that, generally speaking, education
expenditure is related to better outcomes in the sense of increasing
completion rates, increasing test scores, and increasing continuation to
higher educational levels. For higher education, a number of evaluation
studies showed that the type of higher education spending has fundamental
consequences (see the reviews in Curs et al. 2007; McPhersson & Shapiro
1991, 1998, 2006). We know, for example, that higher private tuition amounts
increase educational inequality (Hilmer 2001; Coelli 2009; Hanley 2010) while
generous financial student aid – especially in the form of grants targeted to
low-SES children – decrease educational inequality (Dynarski 1999; Nielsen
et al. 2010; Steiner/Wrohlich 2012). The type of higher education funding
thus has considerable consequences for educational outcomes and (the
persistence of) educational inequality.
A second group of studies explore effects of higher education and R&D
funding on academic output, for empirical reasons mostly understood
in terms of quantifiable measures such as number of publications or
bibliometric analyses. Most of this work is focused on the U.S. or other
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English-speaking countries, but increasingly also other world regions are

covered. Generally speaking, most scholars find a relationship between
funding and output. While earlier work offered simply correlational analyses
(McAllister & Wagner 1981; Teodorescu 1994; Wang et al. 2012) this is also
confirmed in more sophisticated panel fixed-effects analyses (Uyar et al.
2022). Heng et al. (2020) also replicate these findings for “Global South”
countries, both on the national level as well as on the level of individual
higher education institutions. The strength of the identified effect generally
differs across disciplines, though (Zharova et al. 2023).
Several evaluation studies have also focused on particular types of funding
and explored, for example, the effects of performance-based funding. While
the jury is still out, many studies and meta-analyses find null-effects on study
completion rates (e.g. Bell/Fryar/Hillman 2015; Ortagus et al. 2020), indicating
that performance-based funding probably does not really live up to its
promises. Moreover, several unintended consequences exist, e.g. that higher
education institutions have in their admission processes focused on students
that are more likely to graduate on time (biasing against disadvantaged
groups), researchers might have become more risk-averse focusing on
projects that are more likely to produce outcomes, and higher education
institutions have used means to “game the system” (Bell et al.; Ortagus et al.
2020; Jongbloed et al. 2023).

Funding and employment in academia

The type of funding obviously also has important implications for those
employed in academia (in terms of salaries, job security, etc.). To start with,
studies reveal a positive relationship between the levels of research funding
and the number of researchers (Leydesdorff/Wagner 2009). Related work has
shown that under-funding also has consequences: Negash et al. (2019) show
that low salaries in Sub-Saharan Africa led academics to focus on undertaking
non-research activities. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge there
are hardly any studies that allow for causal interpretation of the findings and
the evidence remains correlational. Empirically, we can look at the number of
academic staff and their respective positions (senior, intermediate, junior) as
well as at the employment conditions.
As the simplest indicator, we can simply look at the number of academic
staff employed in higher education. Figure 16 shows the average number of
academic staff for up to 228 countries from 1975 until 2015. We see a steady
increase, especially steep since the turn of the millennium. While we cannot
interpret this evidence causally based on the figure alone, Figure 16 together
with the previously presented Figures show a correlation between increasing
public funding of higher education (and R&D) and increases in the number
of academic staff. The Eurydice reports confirm these patterns for the EU

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countries, as shown in Figure 17. Most countries have increased the number
of academic staff between 2000 and 2015, sometimes by 175% - only a
few countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland) have (slightly) reduced the
number of academic staff.

Figure 16. Average number of academic staff in up to 228 countries around the
globe, 1975-2015.
Source: Own depiction, based on UN data “Academic staff in tertiary education (ISCED 5-8”; http://data.un.org/Data.
aspx?d=UNESCO&f=series%3aT_56).

Figure 17, moreover, sets this data in relation to the number of changes in
student enrollment numbers during the same period (2000-2015). We see
that enrollment numbers have increased in all countries, except Latvia. We
also see some correlation between both developments (Pearson’s r=0.59) as
staff and student numbers on average seem to go hand in hand. Yet, there
is quite some variation across countries: in some, staff and student numbers
have witnessed roughly similar magnitude of change (e.g. Germany, Belgium,
Hungary); in some, student numbers have increased (much) more strongly
than staff numbers (e.g. Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Romania,
Slovakia) indicating a worsening staff-to-student ratio; yet, in many countries
the percentage increases in academic staff have outpaced those of student
increases (Italy, Latvia, Malta, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, UK). In these
latter countries, the staff-to-student ratio has improved, at least as far as this
aggregate data tells us.

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Figure 17. Percentage change in the number of academic staff and number of
students, 2000-2015
Source: Own depiction based on Eurydice [2017]: 19-20.

Not all academic staff are in the same position. Some are more junior or
more senior; some have full-time positions, others part-time; some hold
permanent positions, others temporary. The OECD and Eurydice (2017) data
allow digging deeper into these dynamics. Figure 18 shows the respective
share of “senior”, “intermediate”, “junior”, and “other” academic staff in 2020.
We observe quite some variation. In some countries the share of senior staff
is very low, mostly below 20 percent, often below 10 percent. In Korea, in
contrast, the majority of academic staff is coded as senior. Also noteworthy
is that in some countries the share of junior staff is very large. This is most
extreme in Germany (where hardly anyone is “intermediate”), but also in
Costa Rica, Poland, and Hungary. Other countries have very low shares
of junior staff, especially in Australia and the Slovak Republic. The link to
spending patterns is not straightforward: on average, senior staff earn higher
wages, thereby a larger share of senior researchers should be related to
higher spending. Yet, it depends on the respective combination of senior,
intermediate, and junior staff. To take one extreme case, public spending
in Germany is below the OECD-average, yet it still manages to have rather
high academic output. Part of the reason is that much of this productivity is
made “on the backs” of temporally employed junior scholars, who make up a
large share of Germany’s higher education system, competing for rather few
more senior positions. Generally speaking, it is not the case that we find all
high-spending countries at one end and the low-spenders on the other, for
example. There is also no obvious link to public-private differences or the like.
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Figure 18. Academic staff by seniority level, 2020.

Source: Own depiction, based on OECD 2022: http://stat.link/lz1w80.

A related piece of information are the concrete employment conditions,

especially whether academics are employed on permanent or temporary/
fixed-term contracts. We find information on this in the OECD’s (2021)
“Academic Precarity report”, in the EU’s Eurydice reports, as well as in
an ILO (2018) report on employment terms and conditions in tertiary
education. A first important finding from these studies is that we witness
an increasing share of academic staff in non-standard employment (OECD
2021: 30). Part of the reason is a move away from “basic/core funding” to
more competition-based and project-based funding, which by definition
is temporarily fixed. “De-standardisation” and “dualisation” are general
labour market trends, not specific phenomena of the academic contexts
(Emmenegger et al. 2012): in many countries about 1/3 of all workers work
in non-standard employment. Yet, this is an even larger phenomenon in
academia (Boman 2017; Teixeira 2017).
Despite this general trend, substantive country differences exist. In Europe,
all countries use permanent and temporary contracts in academia, except
Latvia and Slovakia where only fixed-term contracts exist. According to
Eurydice, the highest share of permanent contracts appears in France, Malta,
and Turkey, where more than 80 percent of academic staff are permanently
employed. In contrast, in Austria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, and Serbia
less than 30 percent have permanent contracts. Put differently, the large
majority of academic staff in these countries’ higher education systems are
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temporarily employed. Generally, job security tends to be higher among

more senior staff, which largely follows because of selection effects.
Again, there are links to the types of funding, but once again in non-trivial
ways. While the shift towards more project-funding and competition-
based funding is part of the explanation why we see an increasing de-
standardisation in higher education, this is by far not the only cause, as these
types of contracts were already common before this shift in funding (but
again there is a lot of country variation in this). Moreover, the employment
patterns are not directly linked to the spending patterns.
For the European countries we also have information on the respective
shares of workers employed full-time and part-time. Before showing this
data, it should be noted that there are several kinds and even more reasons
for part-time employment (e.g. voluntary vs. involuntary part-time work).
Two countries showing similar values might thus still have very different
underlying dynamics. Also, there is an important gender dimension here, as
usually women are much more likely to work part-time.
Table 3 shows the share of academic higher education staff working part-
time. We see enormous variation. In some countries (Italy, Romania, France,
Turkey, Luxembourg), essentially nobody is working part-time, whereas this is
the norm in the German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, Switzerland),
Liechtenstein, parts of the Baltics (Latvia and Lithuania). There are also
many countries with more mixed patterns. Table 3 also shows that in most
countries, these shares have hardly changed over the last ten years. But
noteworthy changes are visible in Greece, Hungary, Cyprus, and Latvia (all
showing increases) as well as in Slovenia (showing a decrease), which might
be related to an increasing feminisation of the workforce and more flexible
career patterns. Again, there certainly is some relationship with spending
patterns, but not in a straightforward way, since we do not observe any
similar country clustering as in the spending figures shown above.

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Table 3. Share of academic staff in higher education (ISCED 5-8)

working part-time, 2013-2021.
Source: Own depiction, based on Eurostat data, dataset “EDUC_UOE_PERD05”.

2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021

Italy 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Romania 0.3 0.6 0.3 2.0 2.1 2.0 0.5 1.4 1.2
France 7.9 6.8
Turkey 8.1
Luxembourg 2.0 2.9 10.2 5.6 4.5 6.0 7.1
Poland 4.8 4.4 4.2 8.9 10.2
Serbia 11.0 10.9 10.4 10.5 11.4 11.5 12.3 11.3 11.6
Slovakia 15.1 15.5 15.0 14.2 14.7 15.4 15.5 15.2 15.9
Greece 0.0 8.8 18.5 19.2 9.2 24.4 10.5 23.6
Sweden 29.3 28.9 28.7 29.4 29.2 28.9 29.2 29.2 30.9
Hungary 30.1 29.8 28.8 29.5 31.0 32.9 32.6 35.1 37.1
United Kingdom 39.5 39.7 38.2 38.0 37.9 38.4 33.9
Spain 32.7 33.2 33.9 33.8 34.8 35.3 35.7 35.9 36.3
North
2 0 3.4 24.7 20.8 34.5 36.4 36.9 33.5
Macedonia
Estonia 39.5 40.1 37.8 37.2 39.4 36.6 36.6 35.4
Norway 31.2 33.4 35.3 37.5 36.9 37.9 37.2 37.8
Bulgaria 39.5 38.9 40.7 37.6 37.6 38.1 38.0 37.6 37.9
Croatia 42.2 41.5 39.6 41.0 39.7 39.2 40.0 40.0 41.1
Denmark 39.9 43.1 43.9 42.6 42.8 42.4 40.7 39.0
Portugal 40.9 39.9 39.2 40.7 41.5 42.6 44.3 43.0 43.7
Bosnia and
47.3
Herzegovina
Netherlands 55.9 56.3 40.5 50.3 47.8 47.9 47.7
Albania 47.9
Malta 51.2 54.7 54.5 53.6 54.4 55.9 52.7 54.3 52.5
Belgium 44.3 49.9 51.6 52.5 53.2 53.7 53.9 54.1
Cyprus 39.5 47.2 49.1 55.4 54.8 57.1 57.6 67.6 68.0
Germany 59.7 60.7 61.4 61.5 61.5 61.5 63.3 63.0 62.9
Lithuania 59.7 59.3 60.5 62.9 63.4 63.4 63.8 65.1 67.6
Austria 66.6 66.5 66.9 65.1 65.6 67.0 67.8 66.4 65.1
Slovenia 70.1 69.0 69.4 69.4 69.5 68.1 69.3 69.4 55.7
Switzerland 70.0 70.6 70.6 71.5 71.2 73.0 73.7 73.7 73.6
Latvia 72.3 78.9 81.0 80.3 79.3 82.2 84.8 81.7 82.6
Liechtenstein 81.1 78.6 83.2 84.2 93.3 86.4

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Conclusion & recommendations

for future research

This report aimed to provide a concise overview of funding of higher and

further education research in countries around the globe. Section 2 of this
report presented data from countries around the globe and partly going
back in history to the mid-20th century to outline variation across and within
countries as well as over time. The goal was to find a balance between global
coverage and in-depth analysis, identifying the most important patterns
and trends. Section 3 of the paper summarised some key findings on the
political and socio-economic causes of higher education funding and Section
4 discussed some consequences. Needless to say, one could easily spend
several hundreds of pages delving further into the details and complex
relationships, but that would simply exceed the goals of this report.
A couple of avenues for future research and analysis should have become
clear during the paper. First of all, while huge progress has been made over
the last years in terms of data availability and quality, we still need much
more and better data to really be able to analyse the patterns well. On the
one hand, the data availability is still much better for the wealthy OECD
countries than for the rest of the world. There is a high need for high-
quality comparable data especially for countries in Latin America, Africa, and
Southeast Asia; this is even more true for autocracies, where our information
is generally much worse. On the other hand, several indicators still remain
too broad-brushed so that more fine-grained data would be extremely
helpful. In particular, data on further education and adult education is
still quite sketchy, as it is for important elements like performance-based
funding. Relatedly, while this report has tried to shed light on the most
recent developments during the “poly-crisis” (Great Recession + pandemic
+ “refugee crisis” + Russia crisis + others), we will be much better able to
evaluate the consequences of these once more time has passed and more
data has become available.
Second, while by now a number of high-quality evaluation studies exist, we
still need a much better understanding of the causes and consequences of
higher education funding. In particular, studies allowing for causal inference
would be very welcome. Particularly relevant in this context: we still know
surprisingly little about the role of unions, teacher unions, and student
unions in higher education policy and research policy. Another avenue
for future research appears to be the relationship between funding and
academic employment (conditions), where some patterns seem to exist but
have not been systematically assessed yet.

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Third, scholars and policy-makers agree that funding is an important

dimension of higher education policy – as is governance. Analyses of
governance structures are crucial, because we need to know how higher
education systems are steered and managed. Many of the elements
and phenomena discussed here (e.g. increases in enrollment numbers,
privatisation, performance-based funding, and many others) are obviously
linked to governance questions (Who steers? Who decides? Who
implements? Who evaluates?). Yet, the bodies of literature on funding and
governance still remain quite distinct from each other (Jungblut et al. [2023]
is one of the only comparative studies combining analyses of funding and
governance). Future work should better analyse the interactions between
patterns of higher education funding and patterns of higher education
governance.

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Appendix

Table A1: Government expenditure on tertiary education as a share of GDP

(Source: Own depiction based on UNESCO data, the data describes the year
2020 (+/- 2 years depending on data availability, accessed 27. September
2023)

Government expenditure on tertiary Data referring

Country
education as share of GDP to year
Sierra Leone 3.34779 2021
Denmark 2.42957 2020
Norway 2.31173 2020
Bolivia 1.95354 2020
Sweden 1.8848 2020
Austria 1.85949 2020
Macao (China) 1.82731 2021
United States of America 1.80505 2020
Netherlands 1.6803 2020
Belgium 1.61698 2020
Finland 1.58668 2020
India 1.56936 2021
Canada 1.56866 2020
United Kingdom 1.51377 2020
Barbados 1.49603 2022
Senegal 1.49514 2022
Iceland 1.46798 2020
Chile 1.44513 2020
Costa Rica 1.41252 2020
Switzerland 1.41093 2020
New Zealand 1.4029 2021
Germany 1.38622 2020
Ukraine 1.31053 2020
South Africa 1.30651 2022
France 1.28447 2020
Türkiye 1.25782 2020
Australia 1.19409 2020
Brazil 1.17735 2020
Slovenia 1.15676 2020

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 Education International Research
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Government expenditure on tertiary Data referring

Country
education as share of GDP to year
Poland 1.14424 2020
Estonia 1.13202 2020
Jamaica 1.1099 2021
Spain 1.078 2020
Ecuador 1.03524 2022
Hong Kong (China) 1.01335 2021
Liberia .99569 2021
Croatia .96902 2020
Mexico .94416 2020
Lithuania .93104 2020
Argentina .92327 2021
Republic of Korea .9169 2020
Cyprus .91448 2020
Serbia .90706 2021
Slovakia .90485 2020
Tonga .90339 2022
Israel .89215 2020
Italy .87649 2020
Portugal .87246 2020
Czechia .8611 2020
Maldives .8496 2022
Iran .84481 2020
Latvia .84436 2020
Ireland .8443 2020
Bulgaria .82634 2020
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines .8102 2022
Republic of Moldova .8073 2021
Romania .80675 2020
Bosnia and Herzegovina .80672 2019
Colombia .80302 2020
British Virgin Islands .77775 2021
Belarus .76083 2021
Hungary .75697 2020
Trinidad and Tobago .75389 2022
Côte d’Ivoire .75049 2022
Singapore .74754 2021
Albania .73958 2020
Uruguay .72211 2022

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 Education International Research
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Government expenditure on tertiary Data referring

Country
education as share of GDP to year
Greece .70245 2019
Peru .67169 2022
Uzbekistan .66685 2022
Niger .66059 2018
Paraguay .66037 2021
Mali .65669 2021
Afghanistan .64208 2021
Philippines .64101 2022
Malaysia .63248 2022
Eswatini .62774 2021
Thailand .59807 2022
Saint Kitts and Nevis .59001 2022
Cabo Verde .58304 2021
Azerbaijan .58139 2021
Rwanda .56228 2023
United Arab Emirates .55715 2021
Bhutan .5389 2022
Cook Islands .51136 2022
Marshall Islands .47914 2022
Luxembourg .45656 2020
Turks and Caicos Islands .43368 2022
Belize .42686 2022
Turkmenistan .42164 2020
Guinea .41242 2018
Angola .39808 2022
El Salvador .39421 2021
Mauritius .38704 2022
Dominican Republic .37043 2019
Bangladesh .35459 2020
Chad .35304 2021
Curaçao .3366 2020
Zambia .33254 2017
Guatemala .32833 2022
Nepal .32832 2022
Mauritania .32479 2022
Palestine .31966 2021
Sri Lanka .30558 2022
Vanuatu .28934 2020

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Government expenditure on tertiary Data referring

Country
education as share of GDP to year
Georgia .26839 2021
Armenia .24533 2022
San Marino .24074 2021
Jordan .23186 2022
Cameroon .227 2022
Bermuda .19011 2023
Cambodia .17615 2021
Cayman Islands .15415 2022
Timor-Leste .15297 2021
Sao Tome and Principe .1333 2022
Andorra .12379 2022
Kyrgyzstan .11669 2022
Mongolia .10914 2022
Haiti .10731 2021
Pakistan .07091 2022
Lao .04324 2022
Monaco .037 2021
Fiji .01584 2021

The table turned into a map as visible as Figure 2 of this document on page 6.

50
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