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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 possible transformation of demand for graduate skills and the emergence of new employment profiles. In this article, data for Portugal for the period 2000-2010 were used to look at compositional changes in graduate employment and the incidence of three potential problems in graduates' transition to the labour market: overeducation, overskilling and education--job mismatches. The implications of growing demand heterogeneity on increasing inequality in graduate labour markets and on the expectations supporting mass HE in a country that rapidly expanded access to tertiary education as a strategy to converge with the productivity levels of other more developed economies are discussed.

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 diversity by drawing on the Portuguese higher education' experience, which presented massive expansion during the last decades and significant institutional competition in recent years. The study provides a longitudinal approach and analyzes in detail the evolution of diversification and specialization of the public and private sectors, as well as the university and polytechnic subsectors. The analysis aims at helping to illustrate the relevance of analysing diversity from an empirical point of view and its contribution to our understanding of the complex relationships between competition and diversity in contemporary higher education.

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 paper, we analyse the dissemination of PBF in European HE and discuss its main institutional effects. We will start by discussing the rationales for the introduction of these financial incentives regarding the behaviour of HEIs and their organizational response to externally led stimuli. We then present the dissemination of PBF across European higher education and reflect about the main institutional effects of the dissemination of PBF. We present some concluding remarks about the management challenges created by the emphasis on competitive rationales in public HE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 attention to the link between funding-related problems and merger processes. Moreover, there is very little comparative research among different higher education systems experiencing those processes. In this paper, we map and characterize the recent experience of 25 European countries with these processes, aiming at identifying main patterns regarding key drivers and motivations. We also analyze the main difficulties identified, the role of funding and financial incentives and, whenever possible, the main impacts and economic gains associated with those merger processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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 and institutional competition. In this article we reflect about the relevance of those changes from a regional point of view, especially by looking at the public–private mix of higher education and the way those regulatory changes may have influenced patterns of spatial and programmatic diversification across a sample of European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 diversity by drawing on the Portuguese higher education' experience, which presented massive expansion during the last decades and significant institutional competition in recent years. The study provides a longitudinal approach and analyzes in detail the evolution of diversification and specialization of the public and private sectors, as well as the university and polytechnic subsectors. The analysis aims at helping to illustrate the relevance of analysing diversity from an empirical point of view and its contribution to our understanding of the complex relationships between competition and diversity in contemporary higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]