There is today considerable enthusiasm for public options, notably in the health care and banking sectors. A compromise between entirely private commercial provisions and wholly bureaucratic, tax-and-transfer government provisions, public options are designed to offer citizen-consumers greater choice and protection. In blending (rather than choosing between) market ordering and state welfare, government must cross over. Government officials must step out of their sovereign lane, forgoing legislative and regulatory tools in favor of commercial ones.

Governance in higher education has been described as ambiguous, elusive, and abstract. Both the concept and the practice of governance are recognized as contested, given tensions between different levels of authority and constituency interests: lay or state, academic or institutional, faculty or students. We focus on developments in public and private higher education to illuminate potentially contradictory trends of convergence and divergence in emerging governance arrangements. The chapter draws on a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives for interpreting current governance arrangements in the field of higher education and to highlight gaps in our understanding. The first section addresses the changing landscape of higher education and public–private distinctions in particular. The second focuses on governance arrangements in the arenas of public and private higher education and at the levels of system and institutional governance. The third section discusses theories of governance and their application to public and private higher education domains. The conclusion draws the analyses together, noting gaps and pointing to directions for further research.