The Study of Policy Components in the Tuition Economy in the Public Sector: a Meta-Synthesis of Selected Studies

Today, governments are facing severe financial shortfalls in financing higher education globally. Therefore, due to the necessity, they have established the tuition policy in higher education and are always looking for strategies to increase the effectiveness of this policy. Based on this, the upcoming research aims to study the policy components of the tuition economy in the public sector. This research was done in two stages. In the first stage, the components of tuition policy in the higher education system were extracted using the Meta-synthesis method. For this purpose, specialized research keywords were searched in reliable scientific databases in the period (1990-2021). Finally, among 229 articles, 107 articles were included in the final analysis. In the second step, the qualitative section's findings were weighted using the Shannon entropy technique. In total, seven determining components of tuition policy; student (individual, family); University (complexity in tuition pricing, diversity and a plurality of university policies, academic quality of the university); Higher education (leadership in higher education, rules, and regulations in higher education); State (legal and political mechanisms of State, collaborative and supportive mechanisms of State); Macro governance (good governance, macro laws, and regulations) and environmental (cultural norms, social norms) were identified. The student and environmental components had more weight than other components. In the end, the solutions for the higher education system were stated, including considering the concept of differential tuition, which means paying attention to various factors in determining tuition policies based on the rate of return of academic fields, degrees, geographical region, etc.