ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3681-8720

Date of Award

Fall 2024

Language

English

Embargo Period

11-14-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Educational Policy and Leadership

Program

Educational Policy and Leadership

First Advisor

Daniel C. Levy

Committee Members

Daniel C. Levy, Gilbert A. Valverde, Du T. Huynh

Keywords

private higher education, Vietnam, public - private, sectoral distinctiveness, program offerings, program diversity

Subject Categories

Education Policy | Higher Education | International and Comparative Education | Public Policy

Abstract

The public-private issues in higher education have been a longstanding important topic of academic and policy interest, especially in the context of the public - private duality in most higher education systems. With PHE’s impressive growth over the past few decades, now enrolling one third of global HE enrollments, the study of PHE has also been expanded, with several national case studies and world/regional edited books yet being mostly ad hoc with minimal synthesis or comparative analysis (Levy, 2024). The current case study of Vietnam, employing Levy’s double distinctiveness approach in sectoral distinctiveness analysis with the intrasectoral dissection on the public side, rather than the private side, puts it at the forefront of PHE studies. It uses an exploratory data analysis approach, with quantitative data on regular, full-time undergraduate program offerings from 2005 to 2016 by discipline and field of study. As far as its PHE, VN is far from typical, given the dominance of the for-profit form while the public sector is unusual for having a public autonomous subsector. While the specifics of a country case study make it hard to generalize, the study answers mainstream questions posed in the forefront of the PHE literature, contributing importantly to the studies of PHE.

As studies after studies in PHE continue to show that the public - private sectors consistently exhibit strong and recurring patterns of distinctiveness and blurring, with more weight on the former, so do the findings from the current study. Importantly, by dissecting the public sector into the traditional and autonomous subsectors, the study finds remarkable distinctiveness between PHE and the public traditional subsector in their program offering behaviors while also finding extraordinary resemblance between PHE and the public autonomous subsector. Putting these findings in the twin privatization process, with PHE expansion and the decrease of state financial supports/increased proportion of private moneys (i.e., tuition revenues) in public institutions, these findings offer policy implications on private and public higher education institutions’ behaviors in program offerings: One of the strongest drivers of HEIs’ behaviors in program offerings, particularly among public universities, has seemingly been the partial privatization process. Furthermore, putting aside the “good” and the “bad” in viewing public universities behaving similarly to private, this finding suggests that public universities that participated in the public autonomous university policy pilot seem to have been entrepreneurial in changing and adapting to the partial privatization reality.

Comments

Private Higher Education, PHE

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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