STRUCTURAL COHERENCE AND FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A CRITICAL INTERPRETIVE SYNTHESIS

The pursuit of sustainable funding for higher education is fundamentally impeded. Research is divided between detailed fiscal evaluations and broad governance studies, lacking a cohesive theory that elucidates how systemic structures influence financial resilience or susceptibility. This study utilises a Critical Interpretive Synthesis (CIS) to analyse the fragmented literature and provide a new theoretical framework that elucidates financing sustainability as a dynamic result of structural configurations. An iterative, purposeful study of 92 important sources (2000-2024) was conducted in accordance with known CIS methodology. The analysis transitioned from descriptive themes to explanatory theory through reciprocal translation, refutational synthesis, and lines-of-argument reasoning. The synthesis indicates that sustainability is regulated by three interconnected structural domains: (1) the Regulatory-Institutional (formal autonomy); (2) the Socio-Economic (resource diversification logics); and (3) the Temporal-Political (policy stability). The key discovery is that resilience arises from configurational coherence - a synergistic alignment among these domains. Conversely, vulnerability arises from structural dissonance, when misaligned domains establish path dependencies and detrimental incentives, ensnaring systems in persistent fiscal distress. This study presents the Structural Coherence for Sustainability (SCS) Framework. It reconceptualises sustainability from a financial status to a structural accomplishment, produced by intentionally coordinated policy-institutional ecosystems. The framework offers a diagnostic instrument for policymakers and establishes a novel agenda for configurational research in higher education finance.