Abstract
In contemporary higher education systems, funding is increasingly associated with performativity, assessment, and competition, and universities are seeking different forms of financing their activities. One of these new forms is crowdfunding, a tool enabled by the digitalization of finance. Based on data from the UK higher education system and two crowdfunding platforms, our study adds to previous crowdfunding research in academic settings that have, thus far, focused on research projects, and assesses who is participating, their level of engagement and the resources they have gathered from crowdfunding. Our findings show that crowdfunding is used more by universities that have fewer resources. These universities are more teaching-oriented, less prestigious, and have a student body largely derived from lower socio-economic sectors of society. The popularity of crowdfunding in this type of university suggests that crowdfunding may enhance the democratization of higher education funding. However, as optimal crowdfunding participation and engagement requires high academic-to-student ratios and total-staff-to-academic-staff ratios, universities facing a greater financial precarity may be disadvantaged in their access to and engagement with crowdfunding. Differentials between part-time and full-time student ratios may exacerbate this disadvantage. Our study suggests that crowdfunding is a viable means of obtaining additional financing for learning activities complementing the fundings from other sources, but raises concerns about the use of crowdfunding as a burden to academics and students to find resources to meet learning experiences that ought to be provided by universities in the first place.
Highlights
The funding of higher education has become of crucial importance as the worldwide demand for and participation in higher education has expanded at increasingly high rates (Teixeira & Landoni, 2017)
These results suggest that students from families with a lower social and economic status tend to enroll in less prestigious universities where participation and engagement in crowdfunding activities dominate
Given the nature of our study, where we look at determinants of crowdfunding activity without proposing a causal model, we find it important to keep the number of controls large, in order to take into account the role of all features describing a higher education system
Summary
The funding of higher education has become of crucial importance as the worldwide demand for and participation in higher education has expanded at increasingly high rates (Teixeira & Landoni, 2017). Increased government and public demand for higher education with the expectation of increased economic development and upward social mobility have led to substantially increased public expenditure in higher education This has constrained public budgets in wealthier countries, in terms of both upkeep and investment, and presented a daunting challenge for poorer countries, opening the door to a broad range of privatization initiatives (Langa, 2017). The latter has affected higher education systems by involving the establishment of private higher education sectors and increased competition, marketization, and commodification of tertiary education. These privatization initiatives have affected families’ budgets as some of the participation costs in higher education were transferred to families, and financial instruments, such as student loans and vouchers, were devised to support the participation of students in higher education (Jongbloed & Vossensteyn, 2016)
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