Due to the explosive growth of student enrolment worldwide, higher education faces a global challenge of both numbers and missions. Public authorities attempt at commodifying higher education by having students pay more. They introduce even more competition in the academic scene which is already quite competitive. This implies making academic offers comparable, a process in which the Bologna Reform, accreditation, rankings, and benchmarking play a key role. This book is a must-read for academics, policy makers, and students who want to better understand higher education by examining a number of key issues: higher education as a public good and/or private good, professionalization, students as consumers, the resistance of academia to the large-scale standardization of programmes and degrees, as well as the risks involved in English being used as a lingua franca. A unique facet of the book is its global focus, looking at a large variety of national contexts.
