This ongoing research looks at how higher education systems, and particular institutions, respond to a diminished operating environment. Higher education institutions in a number of countries have faced severe financial pressures from one or more of the following: diminished public capacity to fund universities at a given scale of student enrolments, diminished private capacity to pay for a university education owing to economic downturn, and/or a declining domestic cohort of potential students owing to demographic change. 

The research analyses public policy responses to these diminished means, and examines how higher education institutions (and universities in particular) seek to influence policy in accordance with their financial interests and self-concepts.The project explores whether and how higher education institutions, and entire systems, escape pressures to ‘de-scale’ - downsize - through broadening the ‘market’ they serve, through either being less selective in domestic recruitment, marketing to fee-paying international students, or both. 

The first research stage has focused on the Australian case, culminating in presentation of a substantial paper titled ‘The Political Enterprise of Australian Higher Education Funding’ at the European Consortium for Political Science Research (ECPR), held in Montreal on 26-29 August 2015.