An Essential Concept for the Turkish Higher Education Area: "Competition"

In 2000, Turkey had 1.5 million university students at 71 universities, whereas today, it has a much broader field of higher education with a university student population of over seven million at more than 200 universities. Although this quantitative expansion has brought some advantages, it has also created several problems, the most significant of which have emerged in terms of "quality". Whether quality increases in parallel with this expansion is an essential issue to consider. This paper emphasizes that HE institutions need to focus on "competition" to support the quantitative expansion in the field of Turkish HE with qualitative improvement. For this purpose, first, the state of the Turkish HE was overviewed from past to present. Next, the importance of "competition" for Turkish HE was highlighted and the two fundamental theories of competition were discussed by reviewing the related literature. Finally, a theoretical model based on the factors obtained through an assessment of how these theories can be applied to HE was presented.