What makes a good higher education minister?

Academia is a rather awkward sector to (ad)minister. It is home to peculiarities such as academic tenure, peer-reviewed publications and shared governance. Its higher education institutions are a key engine for local economies and they also play an increasingly active role at an international level, linked both to their teaching and research activities.

Having experience of daily life within academia can be an asset if you are a higher education minister in charge of regulating the system.

We have recently been studying whether higher education ministers with a background in academia as a lecturer, a dean or a rector perform relatively better than those who don’t have that first-hand experience.

To study this question we have explored data about past European higher education ministers and higher education characteristics. We have found that past sector-specific experience does indeed matter, although only in specific conditions.

Comparing higher education systems is a complicated task as there are no representative and meaningful benchmarks such as a PISA – Program for International Student Assessment – ranking at the tertiary level. University rankings offer a limited perspective of the sector. They only focus on top research output mainly for the scientific disciplines done at the very best universities.

Despite this narrowness, we used the results of the Shanghai ranking as a standardised measure to compare how past ministers were able to keep and attract top-notch researchers. We also controlled for various country-related characteristics (such as the state of the economy, the level of political decentralisation in the country, the importance of private higher education institutions and the level of expenditure on higher education).

We observed that, on average, countries with a minister with sector-specific experience tended to do a better job.

There are several reasons. First, they have expertise in the sector. Universities are rather peculiar institutions. Having experienced them from the inside teaches you the foundations and values on which they are based. This can be an advantage when initiating reforms to help them evolve in the right way.

Second, social capital accumulated in the past could be useful when communicating with the sector. Third, during his/her first days in office, this background in academia sends a credible signal about his/her competences and skills. This can placate some academics who might have a certain antipathy towards government. He/she was, and might still be in the near future, one of them!

Political nous

In addition to this, we found that having experience of life in academe had no impact on the funding received by the sector. Several academic works have recently argued that both money and well-functioning institutions are needed to improve the performance of the system. This suggests to us that these leaders have an impact through improving the way institutions work rather than on the way they are financed.

Based on this research, should we parachute an academic in to fill the higher education seat in cabinet? We argue that this is not a good idea. Another characteristic is important: the minister’s political background as measured by their past successful electoral experience.

We found that our results are true for ministers who have some experience in academia and in the political world. Academia is very complex, but so is the political arena. This fact should not be overlooked.

Even though we should be cautious about making firm conclusions based on our empirical analysis, we can start to sketch some of the desirable characteristics of a higher education minister. They should preferably be someone with hands-on insight into the higher education system, but also someone who feels at ease navigating their way through the political maze.

Julien Jacqmin is based at HEC Management School at the University of Liège, Belgium, and Mathieu Lefebvre is based at BETA, University of Strasbourg, France. This commentary is based on their recent article published in Research Policy.