Efficiency and equality are both important goals and values in higher education, and their concurrency (balance) has been one of the main concerns of higher education scholars and policy makers over the past decades. The aim of the present study is to discover the causal mechanism and contextual factors that are likely to result in concurrency of equality and efficiency in higher education. To this end, the combination of two explanatory theories of equality and efficiency were used. The theory of equality focused on three dimensions of equal opportunities, modernization, and cultural differences. Likewise, to explain efficiency, Chalabi’s three-level causal model of sustainable production of science was used. Methodologically, a multiple case study method was adopted, and the cases under study (nine countries) were selected based on purposive sampling. The findings showed that for the concurrency of equality and efficiency in higher education, a set of conditions must be present in the configurational and combinational causality. The preconditions for this concurrency is the presence of some social conditions such as productive economy, the rule of law, inter-societies competitiveness, social cohesion, democracy, universalism, egalitarianism (at macro level), meritocracy, academic autonomy, and organizational competitiveness (at the meso level) and the absence of some other conditions including fatalism (at the macro level).

效率和平等都是高等教育的重要目标和价值观，在过去几十年中，它们的并发（平衡）一直是高等教育学者和决策者的主要关注之一。本研究的目的是发现可能导致高等教育平等与效率并发的因果机制和情境因素。为此，使用了两种解释性平等和效率理论的组合。平等理论侧重于机会均等，现代化和文化差异的三个方面。同样，为了解释效率，使用了沙拉比的可持续科学生产的三级因果模型。在方法上，采用了多案例研究方法，并根据目标抽样选择了研究中的病例（九个国家）。研究结果表明，要实现高等教育中平等与效率的并发，在结构性和组合性因果关系中必须存在一系列条件。并发的前提条件是存在一些社会条件，例如生产经济，法治，社会间竞争能力，社会凝聚力，民主，普遍主义，平均主义（宏观上），精英统治，学术自治和组织竞争力（ （在中观水平上），并且没有其他条件，包括宿命论（在宏观水平上）。