Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘The public good of higher education: A comparative study’

The Special Issue provides the first consolidated outcomes from a large cross-country research project, conducted by the UK-based Centre for Global Higher Education, on the contributions of higher education to public good outcomes. The public good outcomes of higher education are outcomes other than private pecuniary benefits like individual earnings, employment or social status: (a) shared collective social goods, such as the contributions of higher education to social tolerance, or democratic governance and (b) non-pecuniary individual goods such as the lifetime contribution of higher education to the subjectification (self-formation) of students and to their socialisation as citizens in relational settings. This non-pecuniary domain is underplayed or hidden in those economic policies in the Anglosphere that imagine social life in exclusively transactional terms and model students as consumers, universities as businesses and higher education systems as competitive markets, suggesting the need to move beyond the Anglosphere. The research studies reported here compare approaches to public good outcomes (or their nearest lexical equivalents) in Chile, China, Finland, France, Japan and Poland, as well as Canada and England. This introduction explains the project and presents the country studies, also acknowledging the limitations of the research. It concludes with a summary of the research outcomes across the eight countries, including similarities and differences, and a generic transpositional analysis that integrates the separate findings into a single overall picture of the contribution of higher education to the public good in the eight countries.