The Politics of Higher Education Tuition Fees and Subsidies

Abstract

Why do students in some countries pay tremendously high tuition fees while students elsewhere study free of charge? Why do only some countries offer student financial aid? Reviewing the existing literature, this chapter concludes that convincing explanations for the variation in tuition-subsidy systems are missing. I thus propose a new explanation, the Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory, to explain why countries’ tuition-subsidy systems differ considerably. I also use this theory to show why countries have developed from a highly similar starting point in the 1940s to today’s Four Worlds of Student Finance by pointing at the partisan composition of government, particularly the sequence and duration of different parties in office. Moreover, this chapter explains why the Four Worlds of Student Finance become increasingly stable and path-dependent over time.