Enrollment Levels Shape Politics

A first important argument was that the influence of parties might depend on the institutional context. In an important contribution to the field, Ansell (Reference Ansell2008, Reference Ansell2010) argued that political conflict over and effects of parties on higher education depend on the enrollment level (i.e., the proportion of each cohort attending higher-education schools). As long as enrollment levels are low, students mainly come from upper socioeconomic strata (as discussed previously). Thus, Ansell expected right-wing parties, representing these voters, to increase public higher-education spending, whereas left-wing parties would be opposed because their lower-income constituency is less likely to benefit. Instead, left-wing parties are theorized—following Marx’s advice—to favor private spending (i.e., tuition fees) so that students at least pay partly for their own education.

When enrollment levels become more universal and lower-strata children have a realistic chance of achieving access to college, however, Ansell reasons that the partisan dynamics reverse. In this scenario, left-wing parties should favor further expansion to enable their constituency to attend college. Right-wing parties, in contrast, now oppose further expansion because they prefer to keep higher education exclusive. In short, “the impact of partisanship is conditional” on the enrollment level and changes over time (Ansell Reference Ansell2008, 191).

Disaggregating Types of Spending

Overall, the “conditional-partisan-effect model” is straightforward and a great approach to start dissolving the earlier contradictory findings. The model’s blind spot, however, is how enrollment levels change in the first place. Enrollment is the crucial mediating variable, fundamentally changing the politics of higher education—but enrollment itself is treated as exogenously given. The questions of why enrollment levels increase at all and why they should ever reach the “tipping point” remain somewhat understudied (particularly empirically). Conservative parties could anticipate this and stop the expansion before it reaches the tipping point—as happened, for example, in Japan.

More recent approaches tried to resolve these questions by disaggregating spending into different types. Garritzmann (Reference Garritzmann2016) distinguishes public spending on higher-education institutions from spending on students (i.e., financial aid), arguing that both have different political dynamics. This distinction shows that public spending is not automatically fiscally regressive even when enrollment levels are low because governments can target spending to lower strata by investing in student financial aid. Thus, whereas Ansell’s (Reference Ansell2008, Reference Ansell2010) argument about reversing party positions might apply to public spending on higher-education institutions, it does not hold for more targeted spending on student aid. Empirically, this indeed is the case because qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that left-wing governments in all advanced economies across the entire postwar period tried to increase spending on student financial aid, irrespective of the specific composition of the education system (Garritzmann Reference Garritzmann2016).

At the same time, distinguishing types of spending discounts the assumption that enrollment levels are exogenous to the political process. Left-wing parties can affect enrollment levels and the socioeconomic composition of the student body using financial aid. A broad sociopsychological literature confirms that student subsidies have strong positive effects on their enrollment decisions and studying behavior, particularly for lower-strata children (McPherson and Schapiro Reference McPherson, Schapiro, Hanushek and Welch2006). Of course, financial aid is not the only factor driving enrollment levels, but it is important—particularly for lower-strata children.

The Four Worlds of Student Finance and Their Party-Political Origins

Thus, a key insight from the newer literature was that when studying the partisan politics behind higher-education policies, we must consider that these might be conditional on the composition of the education system and the respective type of spending. So, how can we explain why countries’ higher-education funding systems differ? This question is particularly pressing because in the immediate post–World War II period, the higher-education systems of all advanced democracies were still highly similar. Enrollment rates were approximately 2% to 5%, tuition was absent or very low, and public student financial aid was nonexistent. Currently, however, “Four Worlds of Student Finance” (Garritzmann Reference Garritzmann2015, Reference Garritzmann2016) demonstrate very different combinations of public and private spending.

To explain why the advanced democracies developed such different higher-education systems, Garritzmann (Reference Garritzmann2016)—following Ansell and the previous literature—also identified governing parties as the key actor shaping them but points to the crucial role of a party’s duration in office as well. He developed a “Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory” to explain the emergence of the Four Worlds.

In the first group of countries, left-wing parties were predominant in government throughout the entire postwar period (e.g., Sweden). Left-wing parties had already established student financial aid in the 1940s and 1950s, increased enrollment rates considerably (especially among formerly disadvantaged groups), and ensured that no tuition fees were required. Over time, these left-wing–dominated countries established low-tuition–high-subsidy systems. In the second country group, right-wing parties dominated office during the postwar decades (e.g., in Japan). These parties were more interested in maintaining the quality of their elite higher-education institutions than expanding access, so they focused resources on the few public elite schools and provided little support to other students. Consequently, the entire enrollment expansion was captured by the private sector, which naturally was highly tuition-dependent. Over time, therefore, right-wing–dominated countries developed high-tuition–low-subsidy regimes.

In the third country cluster, exemplified by Germany, left-wing parties governed for only a short period before right-wing parties took back office. Left-wing parties thus tried to establish subsidies and expand enrollment of lower-strata children. However, they were unsuccessful in these attempts in the long run because subsequent right-wing governments simply retrenched the subsidy spending and returned to the low-tuition–low-subsidy combination. In the fourth cluster, left-wing governments were in office long enough to establish student financial aid. It was therefore not feasible for subsequent right-wing governments to reestablish it (discussed in the next section). This was the case, for example, in the United States (Mettler Reference Mettler2002). ^{Footnote 2} Here, subsequent right-wing governments switched to their second-order preference, pushing for student loans instead of grants and allowing tuition increases. As a result, countries under this government composition today have high-tuition–high-subsidy systems.

The Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory finds strong empirical support in both historical comparative case studies over seven decades and in quantitative analyses of party positions, effects of parties on public and private spending, and public opinion (Garritzmann Reference Garritzmann2016). The partisan composition of governments and their duration in office can explain the historical emergence of the Four Worlds of Student Finance. Taken together, both Ansell (Reference Ansell2008, Reference Ansell2010) and Garritzmann (Reference Garritzmann2016) showed that the complex (re)distributive dynamics of higher education and the politics behind them can be disentangled once political conflict over education is considered in context.

Why Policy Change Becomes Increasingly Difficult: That Is, Why “Tuition-Free College” Will Not Happen in the United States

So far, this article has focused on the party-political origins of higher-education systems, showing how and under what conditions governing parties shaped them in line with their preferences. A final strand in the literature argued that although parties exercised significant influence on higher-education systems from the 1940s to the 1980s, their impact apparently has vanished in the more recent phase (Busemeyer Reference Busemeyer2015; Garritzmann and Seng Reference Garritzmann and Seng2016). Instead, all countries’ higher-education systems have increasingly become path-dependent. Countries such as the United States and Japan, for example, which rely heavily on tuition fees, have further increased tuition, whereas there are no attempts to establish fees in tuition-free countries such as Finland and Germany. Why is this the case?

To explain this, a number of recent studies point to the power of “positive feedback effects,” following Pierson’s (Reference Pierson1993) seminal work. Pierson argued that, over time, policies can “generate their own support” as beneficiary groups become vocal supporters, thereby making retrenchment increasingly unlikely. Mettler (Reference Mettler2002) transferred these arguments to education, showing how in the United States, education policies shape public opinion and citizens’ behavior. Busemeyer (Reference Busemeyer2015) made similar arguments for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, which Garritzmann (Reference Garritzmann2015, Reference Garritzmann2016) applied to higher education. He shows how, over time, public opinion adapts to a specific higher-education system, thereby making radical policy change increasingly costly for political parties.

In other words, the policy menu of political parties decreases over time. In tuition-free Scandinavia, for example, parties will simply not impose tuition because the large majority of voters strongly oppose private-education expenditure. In the United States and Japan, in contrast, it is highly unlikely that policy makers could entirely abolish tuition fees; this would necessitate taxes hikes, which most voters oppose because they do not want to be charged “twice”—first for their own and then for another’s education (Garritzmann Reference Garritzmann2015, Reference Garritzmann2016). In this vein, although Senator Bernie Sanders was successful in condemning the exorbitant tuition and student-debt amounts in the 2016 US primary campaigns, based on the existing literature, it is extremely unlikely that his ideas will materialize in concrete policies any time soon (however, see Eaton in this issue for regional exceptions).