Old Players—New Rules: Higher education institutions’ response to educational demand

Abstract

Performance indicators and performance‐based funding are becoming integral components of higher education (HE) policy around the globe. We explore some of the implications of this type of policy on Norwegian HE. We believe the case will be of significant interest to policy‐makers, stakeholders and academics alike, not least because our empirical analysis indicates that competition for students is relatively stable and not particularly aggressive across groups of higher education institutions (HEIs) and over time. Despite this fact, a few HEIs have improved their share of applications, while others have fallen behind in the competition for students. The paper is based on a unique data set drawn from the Norwegian Universities and Colleges Admission Service during the period 2003–2009.

Keywords:

• funding—state higher education
• higher education policy
• higher education development
• marketing
• student recruitment and selection

Notes

1. By educational profile, we refer to the type (subject fields and courses within a subject field), number (of subject fields and courses) as well as labels (names or titles) of educational programmes at individual HEIs.

2. We owe this point to one of the reviewers of the paper.

3. Consult also Frølich et al. (2009), Frølich et al. (2010) and Hovdhaugen, Frølich, and Aamodt (forthcoming).

4. The subjects are divided into groups with different prices (medicine has a higher price than the humanities, etc.).

5. We owe this point to one of the referees.

6. We used these criteria to categorise the institutions’ tendency to change programme names as small, medium or large: 0–33.3% of the names changed = to a small extent, 33.4–66.6% of the names changed = to a medium extent and 66.7–100% of the names changed = to a large extent.

7. We used these criteria to categorise the institutions’ tendency to launch new courses as small, medium or large: relative change in the number of courses: 1 = no change, 1.00–1.50 = to a small extent, 1.51–2.00 = to a medium extent and ≥2.01 = to a large extent.