The Disruptive Role of Private Higher Education in the Western Balkans

Abstract

By early 2000s, Western Balkans governments relaxed their monopoly on higher education. Ever since, a large number of private universities have emerged, transforming higher education from a selective model to mass higher education. Initially being ridiculed as diploma mills, private universities have attracted large numbers of students. High enrollments brough about large incomes, which helped private universities to address their logistic and academic capacities. This chapter visits the disruptive role of private universities in the region. It argues that the disruptive role of private universities in the Western Balkans affects society at two levels. First, by helping to forge entrepreneurship and individual responsibility, they disrupt the communitarian culture of social tutelage perpetrated, among others, by public universities. Second, by introducing new academic and administrative practices, private universities disrupt an atrophied university culture carried on by public universities. Eventually, such disruptions would lead to significant social changes in the region.