Governance and accountability in the higher education regulatory state

In recent years it has become commonplace to refer to the development of a ‘new regulatory state’ in a number of advanced societies. For the most part the description has been applied to quite fundamental changes in the nation state, particularly those in Europe characterised previously by state-bureaucratic ‘welfareism’. The growth of the regulatory state, and associated public policy reforms, has given rise to an increasingly sophisticated regulatory scholarship, including of government itself. Surprisingly, regulatory scholarship has been largely disinterested in higher education compared to other sectors. Equally, analyses of higher education governance, although examining closely related notions of the ‘evaluative state’ and associated concepts of market and professional self-regulatory forms of coordination, have yet to fully utilise the findings of regulatory theory applied in other fields. It is suggested that, using the example of external quality assurance particularly, there is no intrinsic regulatory ‘exceptionalism’ for universities and that analyses of the ‘higher education regulatory state’ would benefit from greater application of regulatory concepts found more widely.