In my paper I will discuss the ideas accordant of market ideology in Finnish higher education policy. As a background there are global ideas of new managerialism and New Public Management. Entrepreneurial organizational modes and cultures taken from private sector emerge also in public sector and in higher education. At the end of 1980s Finnish higher education moved to the "doctrine of profitability". It was supposed that universities would serve the whole society and that they should operate effectively. Management by results, accountability and evaluation were new concepts at the 1990s after the deep stagnation. At the time of declining state budgeting, raising revenues from external sources was encouraged by the government. The "third function" of universities now added in the University Act demonstrates the customer service thinking and the fact that higher education is seen as an economic good. More effective commercialization of research results is one aim of the government. Reasoning for that arises from the need to develop national competitiveness and innovation system in global knowledge society. So the values of higher education have been changed a lot in policy level. In Finnish HE policy the competitiveness, innovativeness and quality assurance ideologies promoted also by many supranational agencies are quite clearly adopted. This means that the operational conditions of higher education institutions have also changed, which may lead to a situation where new organizational arrangements, management procedures and a new organizational culture will emerge. The broadest framework for my paper is globalisation and the global competition on human capital. At the second level there is market ideology which penetrates the whole society. The concepts related to neoliberalism like New Public Management, free markets, privatisation, centrality of performance, efficiency, utilitarianism, competition, entrepreneurialism, decentralisation and decrease in public funding are widespread phenomena. What is significant for higher education is the emphasis on knowledge economy. In the global knowledge economy knowledge has got the task of honour to act as a promoter of competitiveness. This increases social and economic demands towards knowledge production as well as towards other tasks of higher education. Knowledge is to be seen as an economic good at the time of economic rationales and values. These values are typical also to new concepts like entrepreneurial university or academic capitalism. As a crude definition we could say that in the present situation the universities have to balance between two extreme positions: traditional academic culture and market culture. My data will consist of Finnish higher education policy documents from year 1985 on. It includes development plans of education and research, reports and memoranda. These are mainly published by Ministry of Education and enable to study the change at the level of national policy. At the second level the data includes institutional documents (and possibly interviews) from three case universities. With these I will examine the organizational changes at the management and practice level in universities and the background for these changes. The methodology utilised is content analysis although it will also be near discourse analysis.