Conclusion

Abstract The final chapter summarizes the book’s findings and revisits the explanatory power of the proposed theoretical framework against competing accounts. It reflects on the role of higher education as a tool of industrial policy and on its potential contribution to one of the greatest contemporary societal transformations, namely the green transition. It further contextualises higher education policy in the current political climate, pointing at the political difficulties that upholding higher education as a valence issue may encounter. It closes on a more general theoretical note by suggesting further integrating insights from the comparative political economy and comparative public policy traditions to gain more fine-grained, yet theoretically parsimonious, accounts of how advanced capitalist democracies deal with the major socio-economic challenges that they face.