University autonomy is a predictor of English medium instruction in European higher education

Despite extensive research into English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in higher education, few if any studies have explored the role of higher education autonomy in driving EMI. This paper tests the novel hypothesis that university autonomy—spearheaded across European higher education through neoliberally predicated ‘steering at a distance’ reforms—predicts EMI. The data are multilevel with higher education institutions (HEIs) nested inside education systems. The University Autonomy Scorecards (Pruvot & Estermann, 2017) operationalise university autonomy at the education-system level (n = 26) and measure four dimensions of autonomy: academic, financial, staffing, and organisational. We include ‘overall autonomy’ as the average. The European Tertiary Education Register provides HEI-level data (n = 1815), which we combine with a count of English-taught degree programmes (ETPs) to measure EMI, provided by Study Portals, the largest online portal of degree programmes. We conduct multilevel regression to analyse the relationships between autonomy and EMI. The results showed that overall autonomy predicts EMI in public universities (p = 0.002). Increasing overall autonomy by one point above the mean increases the likelihood of offering EMI by 9.5%. Academic, staffing, and organisational autonomy predict EMI in public universities, whereas financial autonomy does not. The first to quantify a relationship between university autonomy and EMI, this study offers new insights into how EMI comes about. By revealing a previously obscured interconnectedness between language shift and higher education governance, the study demonstrates the value added of an interdisciplinary approach and proposes a new line of inquiry for future research.