Pedro Teixeira

University of Porto | UP · CIPES & FACULTY OF ECONOMICS

In recent decades, higher education has experienced a massive expansion worldwide, which has often been linked to increasing higher education diversification. New sectors and new types of institutions emerged with this massification process to offer more diversified types of advanced training. At the same time, this expansion was often embedded in...

Mass higher education has promoted the development of larger, costlier, and more heterogeneous systems. Like many public services, HE faced tight competition for funding, alongside pressures to become more efficient in their use of public funds. One major development in public funding has been the introduction of performance-based funding. In this...

In recent years there has been a tendency to deregulate higher education systems, allowing them to follow the interplay of the supply and demand forces instead of shaping it through strong government regulation. One of the areas where these regulatory changes may have a more significant impact is that of access policies. In this article, we analyse...

Human capital has become a popular concept in modern economics since the 1960s, though its historiography is still limited. Prior studies focussed on rational reconstructions, using earlier references to provide legitimacy to modern developments. In this text we take a different approach by tracing the evolution of the term and the (dis)continuitie...

Capítulo do estudo publicado pelo CNE sobre recrutamento e acesso à profissão docente (capítulo referente à situação em países europeus)

In this article we reflect about the dissemination of economic ideas among international organizations by looking at the case of the OECD and its views on education from the early sixties to the mid-eighties. Although previous studies have tended to present the OECD as an early supporter of human capital ideas, our analysis will highlight the stron...

Portugal has traditionally lagged other European countries regarding formal educational qualifications, though over the last 40 years, the higher education system has been profoundly transformed, undergoing a period of rapid growth and massification. One of the major developments in this respect is the relevance of doctoral education. In this chapt...

This chapter describes the national reform processes of six European countries: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Portugal. The approach opted for here has been to give the voice to the individual university rectors and officials that played an important role during the reform processes. By hearing their stories, we obtain a vi...

Diversity has been an important topic of research for some time in higher education, though the purposes underlying this attention have varied across national and regional contexts. In many parts of the world, the term diversity has been emphasized with regard to variety among the programs or services provided by academic institutions, and differen...

In recent years, mergers have been widely used in higher education (HE) to achieve a variety of purposes, ranging from problems of institutional fragmentation to the lack of financial and academic viability, and low institutional efficiency and quality. However, despite a large stream of HE literature addressing those issues, there has been little...

Textbooks are an important subject for the study of science in general and economics in particular. In this paper, we analyse at the process of the acceptance of human capital theory through its inclusion in economics textbooks by looking at two specialized fields to which this theory became highly influential: labour economics and the economics of...

En la última década de su carrera antes de su inesperada muerte, la investigación de António Almodovar estuvo dominada por su interés en el pensamiento económico católico, aparentemente una derivación inesperada en su trayectoria. Sin embargo, encajaba en su enfoque más amplio de la historia de economía, que enfatizaba la diseminación de ideas econ...

Europe and the European Union are close in values, in culture and in attitudes. Yet the EU has made little attempt to jointly reinforce the emotional attachment to Europe. Member States stress their differences in national identity through education and language. When the EU made the borderlines between European countries less visible, the language...

Although the term “human capital” has remote historical roots, being already widespread in the writings of the founding fathers of economic analysis, it was during the second half of the twentieth century that an increasing debate around human capital emerged among scholars. The increasing relevance of human capital for economic growth was also ass...

The increasing influence of economic and management ideas in higher education is associated with changing perceptions of the roles that higher education should play. In recent decades, societies and governments have evolved their views about the social role of higher education, with significant implications for the Identity of HEIs and the Organiza...

Until recent decades, many Western European higher education systems remained subject to strong government regulation and provision (Neave & van Vught, 1993). However, due to a variety of reasons, recently there were important changes in the traditional role of the government as the sole provider of funding and regulation for higher education insti...

South Korea (Korea hereafter) has a substantial private sector participation in higher education. Out of 432 higher education institutions that exist in 2012, 376 institutions (or 87%) are privately owned.1 The importance of private sector contribution can be seen in term of number of student enrolment as well. There are about 3.73 million students...

Throughout this volume, we have tried to discuss the significance and implications of the rise of private higher education as a global phenomenon. The rise of this sector has benefited from the combined effects of financial stringency affecting governments’ budgets, an increased demand for higher education in many parts of the world (especially in...

Globally, higher education is experiencing a rapid and unprecedented expansion. This, combined with rapid socio-economic and political changes, has necessitated policy changes in the field of higher education. Tight national budgets combined with increased demand for higher education and enrolments have forced countries to relax their controls over...

The world is experiencing a rapid expansion of higher education. The expansion is not limited to more developed nations in which tradition of higher education has been in place for several centuries. Even in many low income countries, the expansion of higher education is quite remarkable (Schofer & Meyer, 2005). Accompanying the rapid expansion, th...

The historical evolution of private higher education is a complex process that highlights important changes in the political, legal, and social structure. During this process, the concepts of public and private have evolved, moulding the understanding of what could be considered private and public higher education.

In recent decades, we have seen the emergence of private higher education as a global reality. Although there are specific reasons for its appearance in each system, there is also a significant degree of commonality in the context and purposes surrounding the rise of private higher education as an important factor in many systems. The analysis of p...

The aim of this paper is to identify the main patterns and trends in performance management across the Portuguese higher education system, by comparing the perceptions of different professional groups: academics and non-academics, working in different subsystems (public/private, university/polytechnic). Based on the results of a questionnaire to th...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the main patterns and trends in performance management across the Portuguese higher education system, by comparing the perceptions of different professional groups: academics and non-academics, working in different subsystems (public/private, university/polytechnic). Based on the results of a questionnaire to the...

One of the main characteristics of economic policy-making in the postwar period was the rise of international agencies and their influence in setting the agenda in various policy aspects. Education was one of the areas that became very important to the activity of international agencies. This article analyses the changing views about education of t...

In recent decades, we have seen the emergence of private higher education in many European countries. This has been associated with the waves of significant expansion of the higher education system and with changes in regulation patterns, which have promoted a growing private-like behavior of public higher education institutions and the development...

It is not rare to read positive comments about North American higher education from higher education stakeholders in Europe, particularly policy-makers and institutional managers. The aspects of the system which are most often praised are the degree of institutional competition and the benefits this brings in terms of institutional flexibility, res...

In this book we aim to discuss and reflect on how HEIs are coping with the demands placed on them and how the various dimensions of change are intertwined. In particular, we aim to discuss the following questions: How do governance regimes steer higher education institutions? This part of the book focuses its attention on how higher education and...

Recent decades have seen a massive expansion in higher education (HE), fuelled by high expectations about its private benefits. This has raised concerns about the impact on the employability of recent graduates and the potential mismatches between their skills and the competences required by the job structure. Equally, it could set the ground for a...

Economic aspects of knowledge have become increasingly important in the era of globalization and international competition on the one hand and in the context of financial austerity on the other hand. In a rather complicated environment of slowing economic growth, a rapidly aging population and increased unemployment, European universities are seen...

In the context of increased international competition and financial austerity, an economic development mission has become an important strategic and policy issue for European higher education. This paper aims to contribute to knowledge regarding universities’ engagement with the external environment and its impact on internal governance and managem...

In the last decades, European higher education systems have been experiencing an unprecedented expansion, which created significant financial and political challenges. At the same time, we have seen a shift in attitudes towards public higher education that has promoted new ways of funding this sector. This context has led to major changes in the fu...

Since the emergence of human capital theory in the late 1950s and the subsequent development of the economics of education, there has been some interest and debate about the historical roots of the economic analysis of education. There is a consensus that, until the mid-twentieth century, most economists paid little attention to the economic analys...

Over the past decades a continuous trend of expansion has led to the emergence of massified higher education systems that have tried to accommodate a growing diversity of students and demands through diverse institutional profiles and program supply. Recent studies have also pointed out to a growing diversity in the transitions and integration of t...

Over the last decade, Ethiopia has seen a major leap in education enrollment. The private sector has provided a significant contribution to this expansion, notably in higher education. The expansion of higher education has been accompanied by an attempt on the part of the government to establish at least one university in each regional state. Regio...

In this article we investigate whether education-job mismatches and growing occupational diversity are important explanatory factors of gender pay gaps amongst university graduates in Southern Europe (namely in Portugal, Spain, and Italy). We use standard decomposition techniques and test the implications of controlling for selection bias. Our resu...

In the context of accelerated international competition on the one hand and financial austerity on the other, economic aspects of knowledge have gained an unprecedented significance. Along with universities’ traditional missions of teaching and research, an economic development mission has become an important strategic and policy issue for universi...

Portuguese speaking countries represent one of the largest linguistic communities in the world, though this tends to be less visible in the case of higher education than for other widely spoken languages. Moreover, the existing literature on higher education systems in Lusophone countries is scarce and very unevenly distributed. Thus, in this artic...

ᅟ In a prolific and illustrious career, the late Gary Becker (1930–2014) developed what he would later call "the economic approach to human behaviour". One of the most significant strands of that research was that which focused on human capital, occuping a significant part of his career, especially in his early years. In this paper we will focus on...

Higher education institutions face today a demanding and complex context in which they are asked to fulfill multiple roles. Many of these challenges have to be faced in a complex financial context in which traditional modes of funding have been transformed and public sources are not as generous as they often were in the past.Like in many other publ...

The governance of higher education has been changing across Europe, most notably in response to the reform agenda that has been pervading many higher education systems. This wave of reforms has given enhanced visibility to external stakeholders, which has been often received with contrasting views. Some regarded it as a factor that would undermine...

Financial stringency has been an increasing concern in the higher education sector, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. Public higher education institutions have therefore been under increasing pressure to diversify their funding sources through tuition fees and other non-public revenues. This study reflects on the institut...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in history of science in the study of textbooks and their multiple roles for the contemporary history of science. In this text we look at MIT economics by exploring the role of textbooks in consolidation of the department’s position internally (within MIT) and externally (among other economics depar...

This book analyzes the reforms that led to a differentiated landscape of higher education systems after university practices and governance were considered poorly adapted to contemporary settings and to their new missions. This has led to a growing institutional differentiation in many higher education systems. This differentiation has certainly co...

The development of mass higher education and growing competition between higher education institutions has given increasing visibility to the issue of diversification. This article analyses the issue of programme diversification, using a panel of 181 Portuguese higher education institutions over the period 1995 to 2007, by comparing the behaviour o...

This article analyses the evolution of relative earnings premiums for young university graduates in Portugal (1995–2009), suggesting that the previous picture of a successful transition towards mass higher education changed significantly. Our results indicate a decline in the average premium and an increasing dispersion in the returns to higher edu...

Decades of expansion in European higher education have led to the need to cater to an increasingly diverse student population in a more economical and efficient way. The realities of mass higher education have resulted in major transformations, with visible changes in the modes and instruments of regulation and a greater emphasis on market forces a...

European Higher education is facing times of significant change that has been affecting its identity and the political expectations regarding its societal roles. At the European level this has been fostered by a trend that increasingly regarded higher education as a tool for economic and social development. Hence, we have seen a reconfiguration of...

Being mainly a field of studies and not a discipline, higher education has had to develop an institutional network in order to support and nurture the community of higher education researchers. Researchers working on new fields have to develop persistent and effective networks of communication with the rest of the practitioners in the field and con...

In recent years we have observed a significant growth of the private sector in many higher education systems around the globe. This growth of private higher education was associated with high political expectations, notably concerning greater choice of programs and greater responsiveness of institutions to students’ and labor market’s demands. Look...

Despite her sadly short academic life, Leonor Vasconcelos Ferreira has left us a set of publications of noticeable scientific quality and explicitly social relevance, focusing on the study and measurement of poverty and income inequality. The present article briefly summarises the outcome of her work and the concerns underpinning it.

This paper addresses a group of Catholic political economists in France in the 1830s, which was described by the Dublin Review as ‘Catholic in its faith, and Catholic in its manner of conceiving science’. A first section clarifies how contemporaries perceived this group. This is followed by an analysis of Villeneuve-Bargemont's Economie politique C...

The governance of higher education at system and institutional level across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has been changing, notably in response to ‘higher education reform’ agendas at European, national and provincial levels over several decades (Haug and Kirstein, Trends 1: trends in learning structures in higher education. European U...

Abstract Although Jacob Mincer (1922 to 2006) is usually regarded as one of the most important labor economists of the second half of the twentieth century, his contributions to economics have been scarcely analyzed from an historical point of view. The main purpose of this text is to contribute for better understanding of Mincer's work and his rel...

In recent decades, we have observed a growing privateness in higher education around the world. This chapter analyses one of the main dimensions in that trend towards privatisation, namely the development of a strong private sector in the Portuguese setting. The chapter analyses how the private sector came to play a major role in Portuguese higher...

In recent years, much has been written about the challenging financial context faced by many European higher education institutions, and the pressures towards funding diversification. However, the evidence available indicates that funding diversification has seldom lived up to the rhetorical expectations of marketization and privatization that have...

Ce chapitre étudie selon une perspective historique l’émergence de l’enseignement supérieur privé dans le monde. Il retrace tout d’abord succinctement l’histoire du secteur mondial de l’enseignement supérieur privé, en la considérant notamment par rapport à la formation de l’État moderne. Le chapitre s’intéresse ensuite aux moteurs de l’essor des p...

The expansion of higher education systems has often been associated with the need for increasing diversification, namely at the program level, based on the pressures to adapt more general programmes to a more diverse student population and multiple regional, social, and economic needs. This paper explores empirically the question of programme divers...

This paper provides a new and systematic characterization of 488 universities, from 11 European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and UK. Using micro indicators built on the integrated Aquameth database, we characterize the European university landscape according to the following...

The first in a series of books published with the IZA, this book presents and analyzes the work of one of the most important economists of the 20th century - Jacob Mincer. Mincer's work has had a lasting influence on contemporary labor economics in both theoretical and methodological terms. Mincer played a central role in shaping contemporary labor...

The appeal of HE expansion has been particularly significant in the case of Portugal, whose levels of qualification of the labour force have been historically low. Over the last two decades the country has experience a massive expansion of its higher education system and the numbers of students enrolled and rates of enrolment have multiplied more t...

Recent years have seen the strengthening of a discourse that emphasises the virtues of markets, competition and private initiative, vis-à-vis the vices of public intervention in higher education. This volume presents a timely reflection about the effects this increasing marketization has been producing in many higher education systems worldwide. Th...

This paper reflects on quality assessment and performance evaluation in higher education, namely by analysing the insufficient link between those two aspects. We start by reviewing the current state of the art regarding different processes and mechanisms of quality assessment and performance evaluation and discuss some of the major issues regarding...

This chapter takes a long historical perspective on the global emergence of private higher education. It first provides an overview of the history of private higher education worldwide by examining it within the context of the evolution of the modern State. The chapter then focuses on the driving forces behind the recent expansion of private provis...

Recent changes in higher education, especially associated with its massification, have led to calls for more accountability and to an increasing need to evaluate universities' performance. However, comparing universities with different subject mixes poses some significant problems. In this article, a linear mixed-effect model methodology allowing f...

The emergence of Catholic economic thought in the late nineteenth century was preceded by several attempts to deal with some crucial moral issues arising out of economic activity, although economic questions did not rank high in the church's concerns until the second half of the nineteenth century. From the 1830s onward we identify several politica...

Although Catholic economics’ roots date back to the beginnings of Christianity, its emergence as a structured discourse developed later and slowly. The establishment of a distinctive Catholic approach to modern social and economic problems had to await a more extensive development of the market system and the emergence of political economy. The mos...

The literature on higher education used to postulate that we should expect a much more diversified student population once a system of higher education grows in size, and particularly when it moves from an elite to a mass system. There was also the presumption that increasing enrolments would go hand-in-hand with a decreasing percentage of the weal...

Anyone who has followed an economic controversy will have encountered the expectation that empirical research could provide an important role in clarifying the issues at stake. However, this hardly ever seems to be the case. Using the example of the debate between human capital and screening theories to explain the correlation between education and...

The topic of declining private higher education (PHE) has become a timely one, especially for many countries that had previously experienced a rapid and massive expansion of their systems of higher education, and of PHE in particular. In the case of Portugal this was very likely due to the stabilisation and then the slight decline in the number of...

In 1985, I was granted a three-month sabbatical: a reward for having survived five financially challenging and sometimes stressful years as president of the largest comprehensive college in the State University of New York system. More than a little of the stress had stemmed from my incessant sparring with the governor and the New York State Legisl...

Higher education throughout the world has become increasingly important in the decades closing the 20th and beginning the 21st centuries. This is nowhere more true than in the so-called mature economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in which higher education has been a vital component of democratic civil societ...

Higher education finances lie at the crossroads in many Western countries. On the one hand, the surging demand of the past three or four decades, driven by a belief in higher education as a principal engine of social and economic advancement, has led to dramatic growth of the higher education systems in these countries. On the other hand, this grow...

Markets or market-like mechanisms are playing an increasing role in higher education, with visible consequences both for the regulation of higher education systems as a whole, as well as for the governance mechanisms of individual institutions. This article traces the history of economists’ views on the role of education, from Adam Smith, John St...