The Economics of Higher Education
Affordability and Access; Costing, Pricing and Accountability

David Palfreyman MA, MBA, LLB Bursor and fellow, New College Oxford and Director of OxCHEPS
Published: 2004

After the Commons debate of 27 January 2004 on the second reading of the Higher Education Bill, where the Government scrapped by with a humiliating margin of just five votes, the furor over the future and funding of UK universities has faded into the Committee stage and the relative calmness of the Lords. As the dust settles on the 2003 White Paper on Higher Education and on the 2004 Higher Education Bill, and assuming the Bill will by July indeed have become an Act, we are left with a rather small and very tentative step having been taken, albeit a step in exactly the right direction and towards the deregulation and marketisation of HE, towards its de-nationalization and (re)privatizatlon, towards the beginning of its Americanization and away from the bleak prospect of its increased Europeanization. This book explores the economics of financing universities in the UK and in the USA, and considers how national HE systems in delivering the teaching of undergraduates as their largest cost determine the difficult balancing of the degree of public funding as a burden upon the taxpayer as against the level of a private contribution from the student/family through tuition fees.

David Palfreyman is the Bursar of and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Studies (OxCHEPS), a 'think-tank' independent of both New College and the University of Oxford. He is the author, with Ted Tapper, of Oxford and the Decline of the Collegiate Tradition and editor, with David Warner, of Higher Education Management and of Higher Education Law, as well as being general co-editor of the Open University Press/McGraw-Hill fifteen volume Managing Universities and Colleges series. OxCHEPS is a resource for the management of higher education institutions, including the provision of on-line 'Law Update' and 'Law Casebook' support for Higher Education Law and the availability of the 'Higher Education Mediation Service'.

Published by The Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies
Paperback £9.99 – ISBN 0 9547433 1 8
Hardback £14.99 – ISBN 0 9547433 0 X
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