Liberalizing Higher Education: Competition and Control in the United States and Germany

Higher education has experienced rapid institutional changes around the world as it expanded during the past two decades. This article proposes government-sanctioned liberalization as a productive lens to study this transformation and explores the role of state structures in mediating its course. Empirically, the analysis focuses on the United States and Germany, countries with leading higher education systems around the world and central to debates over the evolution of science and higher learning. Conceptually, the article concentrates on public authorities’ attempts to simultaneously increase and control competition among universities. As countries organized along different federal principles, the two cases show how public authorities’ institutionally rooted capacities for cooperative policymaking – from coordination among themselves to concertation with society – have contributed to unique modes of institutional change and conditioned regulatory limits to capitalist dynamics in higher education. The analysis not only helps to illuminate complex patterns of causation behind national reform trajectories in higher education, it also exposes state organization as a crucial influence on evolving social citizenship across the rich democracies.