CGHE Webinar 55

Horizontal diversity in higher education systems: does the growth of participation enhance or diminish it?

Date: Thursday, 6 July 2017 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location: Room 728, UCL Institute of Education

Speaker(s):

Simon Marginson, University of Oxford

Higher education research and scholarship have devoted much energy to questions of the three-way relationship between the growth of participation, market competition, and horizontal diversity between institutions (meaning distinctions of institutional mission or type).

Professor Marginson reviews the scholarly evidence, reflects on the outcomes of a recent review of high participation higher education in eight countries, and draws conclusions about the main tendencies in the configuration of higher education systems and institutions.

The bulk of the empirical evidence suggests that an enhanced role for markets is associated with an increase in imitating behaviour and the narrowing of mission differences, rather than diversity.

In relation to growth, it is difficult to separate the effects of expanding participation from contextual factors, but the overall tendencies appear to be (1) an increase in vertical stratification, (2) growth in the importance of large multi-disciplinary multi-purpose institutions, (3) a decline in horizontal diversity overall, and (4) an increase in internal diversity within larger institutions.

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods.