Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management

Financing higher education – institutional and student perspectives

The Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management (JHEPM) is an international journal that advances the scholarship of working and policymaking in higher education.

This special issue is dedicated to recent developments in the financing of higher education worldwide.  In addition to providing an up-to-date overview of how higher education institutions are funded and the systems of student financial support and tuition fees in different countries, we invite expressions of interest for submissions that examine the consequences of various policy arrangements for a wide range of outcomes.

Closing date for abstract submissions: 8 June 2026 (23:59 GMT/UTC)
Planned publication for this Special Issue: August 2027
Submit your abstract to Dr Carroll Graham, Special Issues Editor, at [email protected]

Brief rationale and scope

The iron triangle of higher education financing comprises government subsidies, student fees, third-party funding, and other sources, which typically include varying amounts of commercial income, donations and bequests. The size and shape of the triangle – the amount and proportions of funds obtained from each source – vary markedly by country, and in many countries have changed substantially over time. Yet, the volume of global comparative studies explaining changes and examining their consequences for core functions of higher education does not match the pertinence of this issue at times of austerity.

Student funding policy shapes the financing of study costs, including students’ living expenses. It typically encompasses non-repayable merit or needs-based grants, state-subsidised student loans, tax allowances and credits, and in-kind benefits on the support side as well as tuition and other fees on the cost side. Entitlements to benefits and payment obligations can be universal or targeted to specific groups of students. Policies vary enormously across and sometimes even within countries, but, so far, this variation has been surprisingly little exploited in research on student outcomes. Furthermore, the trend towards cost-sharing observed in times of higher education expansion seems to have weakened and even reversed in some cases of high-income democracies. However, scholarly evidence of more recent developments is surprisingly scarce.

Many governments are bound to restricted fiscal policy and face increasing demands from managing uncertainties arising from climate and geopolitical changes. Students resist increased costs of studying, more so as their perceptions of benefits from higher education are plateauing due to the increasing variety of rates of return to higher education. While some institutions gain substantial funds from sources other than government grants and fees, these are exceptional, and very difficult to increase over the short and medium terms. At the same time, government allocations are often not commensurate with increasing research costs, leading to the worsening of career prospects for new generations of academic workers.

These pressures on higher education financing seem perennial and almost universal, with varying intensity. But the iron triangle, alongside broader social and political settlements, seems to be fragmenting as political forces realign both nationally and internationally. This special issue aims to address these contemporary issues in the financing of higher education in a historical country case or comparative perspective. Questions we want to answer include, but are not limited to:

1. What are the developments of higher education financing worldwide and in particular regions or country groupings based on their position in the global economy?
2. What are the consequences of different country-level arrangements in student support and fees policies and/or institutional funding for social and economic outcomes, including educational performance and social inequality?
3. Is there a budgetary trade-off between student funding and institutional funding? How do different countries coordinate and balance their respective expenditures, and what are the consequences of different approaches for the sustainability of higher education financing?

We invite contributions from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, with a particular emphasis on empirical analyses employing quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods approaches. Preference will be given to comparative studies.

A limited number of abstracts will be selected for development into an article for the special issue. Abstracts can be up to 500 words, excluding references.  Papers can be up to 7,000 words in length, including references, tables and figures. Shorter essays of up to 2,000 words targeting specific elements of the Special Issue themes are also welcome and will be published as professional and comment articles.  Final acceptance of manuscripts will be subject to the standard peer review process in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management. The guest editors can provide support to shortlisted authors to develop their papers if required, but only manuscripts of publishable quality will be included in the special issue.

About the Special Issue Editors

Krzysztof Czarnecki is a researcher at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University. He specialises in student funding and higher education, social policy, and comparative political economy. His current research focuses on two main areas: the causes and consequences of student funding policies, and organisational stratification in European higher education systems. At SOFI, he has developed the Student Support and Fees Dataset – an open-access resource for comparative research on student support and tuition fee systems. During his doctoral studies, he investigated inequalities in access to higher education in Poland and Australia, examining how rising enrolments interact with the socioeconomic background of students at prestigious institutions. His research has appeared in leading journals, including the Journal of European Social Policy, Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Krzysztof holds a Master’s degree in Political Science from Adam Mickiewicz University and a PhD in Economics from Poznań University of Economics.

Andrew Norton is Professor of Higher Education Policy in the Monash Business School at Monash University.  His previous roles include Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at the Australian National University and Higher Education Program Director at the Grattan Institute.  He has a long-standing interest in higher education student funding with a focus on Australia.  He has written reports on the student loan system, on methods of setting student fees, on financial returns to education and on demand-driven funding.  In 2013-14, he was the co-author of a government-commissioned review of the demand-driven student funding system.  He maintains an historical time series of domestic student funding as part of his Mapping Australian higher education publication, which is updated via his blog, andrewnorton.id.au.

Héctor Ríos-Jara is a researcher at the Centre of the Study of Economics and Society of Universidad Central de Chile, and an Adjunct Researcher at the Millennium Nucleus in Labour Policy and Family and Collective Life (LABOFAM). Héctor holds a Bachelor’s degree in social psychology from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, a Master's in Social Research Methods from Bristol University and a PhD in Social Sciences from UCL (University College of London), United Kingdom. He was previously a consultant for the United Nations Program in the area of international relations for the Undersecretariat of Higher Education of Chile and has served as a consultant on higher education financing policy at the Ministry of Education of Chile. His lines of research include contemporary socio-political conflicts, public policies and comparative studies in higher education funding policy.