This book analyzes the political economy of higher education finance across a range of OECD countries, exploring why some students pay extortionate tuition fees whilst for others their education is free. What are the redistributional consequences of these different tuition-subsidy systems? Analysing the variety of existing systems, Garritzmann shows that across the advanced democracies "Four Worlds of Student Finance" exist. Historically, however, all countries' higher education systems looked very much alike in the 1940s. The book develops a theoretical model, the Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory, to explain why countries have evolved from a similar historical starting point to today's very distinct Four Worlds. The empirical analyses combine a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative evidence, studying higher education policies in all advanced democracies from 1945-2015.
"Julian Garritzmann's book provides a very important addition to the literature on higher education policy-making as well as higher education finance. His study is well grounded in contemporary approaches from political science, and the breadth as well as depth of his empirical analyses is impressive. His call for attention to political processes, system structures as well as political actors and their preferences in the study of higher education policy is timely and well argued." (Jens Jungblut, European Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 7 (1), January, 2017)