Public Mission under Scarcity: Behavioral Insights into Greek Higher Education

Relying upon the heuristic presuppositions of behavioral economics, this study seeks to offer an expanded analysis of the public mission mandate of the Greek higher education sector. The examination outlines and parses qualitative evidence issued from the Greek Ministry of Education, and in particular from the hitherto untranslated document "A Strategy for Higher Education in Greece: 2016-2020," in conjunction with a growing body of scholarship on the challenges of cultivating public trust in the Greek social landscape. The discussion negotiates the position of the Greek higher education system as a system of sustainable social prosperity and argues that its operational conditions of financial scarcity may entail broader and inadvertent ramifications, namely, the depletion of cognitive resources and the propagation of narrow mental frames in the pursuit of a public mission.