Rethinking Private Higher Education takes the university as a core institution in modern nation states, which is currently undergoing a serious revision. It offers fresh insights into the actual meaning of ‘private’ in different higher education contexts, contributing to a deeper understanding of the actual effects of global policies in local contexts through ethnographies. This book explores how private universities were established, their context and history, and their changing business models and operations.

The strengths of this book are its ethnographic detail, which shows the complexity and fast changing forms of private higher education, and its reluctance to jump to simplified labelling of public and private. It is a model for further ethnographic studies of local developments in higher education.

Contributors are: Ayca Alemdaroglu, Daniele Cantini, Carmela Chavez Irigoyen, Enrico Ille, Sylvie Mazzella, Alexander Mitterle, Annemarie Profanter, and Susan Wright.