Daniel C. Levy

The international privatization of higher education is so rapid and multi-
faceted that we struggle to track it, let alone understand it. This chapter
suggests how both tracking and understanding can be promoted by the
use of recent work in organizational sociology. Less directly, but to the ex-
tent that enlightened and appropriate decision making depends on accu-
rate observation and interpretation, this chapter may also be a building
block to better policy.

A key question to ask when observing virtually any rapid change in
institutional configuration is what difference it makes. So what if private
higher education is expanding prodigiously? To zealots on both the sup-
portive and the antagonistic sides of the expansion, the "so what" question
may appear unproblematic, but scholars and responsible policymakers re-
quire careful answers. For private higher education, the issue of diversity
is significant. To make a difference, for better or worse, private higher edu-
cation must bring something important not otherwise found in the higher
education system.

This chapter explores the diversity issue or, more specifically, a critical
aspect of it: the limits to diversity. The exploration starts from the realiza-
tion that a sharp clash of perspectives separates two literatures logically
consulted to tackle the diversity issue. One literature is essentially descrip-
tive, attempting to track developments in private higher education. The
other literature, the "new institutionalism," is essentially theoretical, at-

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