Worldwide, Financing for Higher Education Is Increasingly Shifting From Public to Private Sources

The title says it all. This article is a report by Burton Bollag of The Chronicle for Higher Education. He writes (requires subscription and registration for access):

The shift toward private financing has been driven by rapidly growing enrollments in almost all countries in the world. This has been caused in part by expansion of public school systems, resulting in growing numbers of young people graduating from high school. The other factor is economic: the growth of a global, "knowledge" economy that increasingly requires employees with a college education.

Those trends are all clearly visible in three of the world's largest countries. In China college enrollments more than doubled between 1998 and 2004. That expansion followed the introduction of tuition at Chinese institutions. By one estimate, from 1990 to 2001, the share of public financing in Chinese higher education dropped from 99 percent to 55 percent. India and Indonesia experienced similar developments. Together, those three Asian giants account for 41 percent of the world population.

The report on which the article is based, from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, is titled, "The Global State of Higher Education and the Rise of Private Finance," and can be downloaded in full (no fee) here.