This thesis contextualizes the English higher education restructuring in its analytic connection with the national and the global political economy. The analysis of the key drivers involved in the reshaping of the higher education sector from the 1980s onwards shape the contours of a complex framework where multiple actors and forces coexist and collide. Massification, marketization and competition constitute the underlying themes of the study: their synergy explains the internal reorganization of the Western mature education sectors. Within the latter, the English higher education has been and is currently being ideologically reformed along neoliberal, marketoriented lines. Its expanded sector is considered both as a dynamic site of convergence of exogenous and endogenous forces of change and as the provisional outcome of a series of policy interventions resulting from an historically contingent political rationality. The research question will explore whether the marketization of higher education will enhance the polarization of the English universities by marking a steeper reputational and financial divide between research-intensive, internationally competitive institutions and teaching-intensive, nationally and locally oriented institutions; or, alternatively, whether a more decisive opening to market forces will generate counter tendencies that point to convergence (reduced diversity) within the sector.