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Public systems of higher education worldwide are caught between increasing public and private demand for their products, rising per-student costs, and flat or even declining governmental revenues. Thus, the fundamental condition of higher education, especially in the low and middle income countries, is dominated by the radically diverging trajectories of higher education costs and available governmental revenues, underscoring the worldwide search for other-than-governmental revenue sources for higher education. This is the higher educational austerity rationale for cost-sharing-which term reflects both the simple fact that the underlying costs of higher education are shared by governments (or taxpayers), parents, students, and philanthropists, as well as a description of a worldwide policy trend of these costs being increasingly shifted from governments to parents and students.
The underlying theory of cost-sharing as well as the description of its worldwide reach were developed from 1986 through 2006 mainly by the works of Johnstone and his Ford Foundation financed International Higher Education Finance and Accessibility Project at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The principal papers from this project are reproduced in this volume. They examine the worldwide shift in the burden of higher education costs from governments and taxpayers to parents and students, and the policies of grants, loans and other governmental interventions designed to maintain higher educational accessibility in the face of this shift.
