Hey, big spender! Institutional reponsiveness to student demand

In many countries, market-like mechanisms have been introduced into the traditionally public domain of higher education. The main drive for this has come from the government’s realisation that it has only limited steering capacity through planning and control mechanisms (Van Vught 1997). Many governments aim at enlarging the adaptive capacity, flexibility, efficiency and quality of higher education. In short, governments took a step back and, by implementing market-like policy instruments, they hoped to make higher education institutions more accountable and responsive to the needs of society. These new steering strategies have led to developments such as deregulation (by providing more autonomy to institutions); competition (between public and private institutions for student places and research funds); the implementation of quality assessment; and the introduction of or raising of customer (tuition) fees (Dill 1997).