Higher education and common good: Problems of definition, comparison and observation

Though higher education is often associated with pecuniary outcomes for graduates, it also makes multiple diverse contributions to collective social outcomes. These contributions are under-theorised. The theoretical lacuna is associated with a policy lacuna, especially in the individualist market-based systems of the Anglosphere. The paper reports on the outcomes of a comparative research project, using semi-structured interviews in ten countries in higher education and government, focused on approaches to the public good role of higher education. Though discourses and practices of the public good varied on a national basis, in all countries, interviewees (including most government interviewees) saw higher education as generating similar lists of collective outcomes. The possibility of worldwide consensus was blocked by the neoliberal dualism in national economic policy, whereby public and private goods appear as opposing and zero-sum rather than interdependent and simultaneous, the default is market production of private pecuniary benefits, and collective outcomes are largely unrecognised. Hence institutions seemed freer to create collective goods in the local and global scales than the national scale. The discourse of higher education as common good(s), not public good(s), provides a way out of the neoliberal constraint. The paper explores higher education as a common good, including a global common good, and considers the potential for metrics that could advance observation, monitoring and improvement.