Valuing Higher Education: An Appreciation of the Work of Gareth Williams

In Valuing Higher Education, leading international analysts examine Gareth Williams’s contribution to shaping our thinking about the economics of higher education in essays that are a testimony to Williams’s conception that the field cannot be properly understood unless viewed alongside social policy, changes in knowledge production, the life chances of students, and their actual learning experience.

Questions identified and discussed include the rise and limitations of markets, the balance between higher education as a public and a private good, the financing of higher education, and audit arrangements. Behind all of the analyses stands the larger question: What is the value of higher education?

The distinguished contributors critique contemporary developments in essays that will also inform further research and policymaking, not least in Williams’s own concluding response, which offers glimpses of future possibilities.