CGHE Webinar

Assessing the contributions of higher education – a CGHE webinar series

Date: Tuesday, 14 March 2023 2:00 pm to Thursday, 23 March 2023 3:00 pm

Location: Zoom webinars, registration required

Speaker(s):

Assessing the contributions of higher education (2023), published by Edward Elgar can be downloaded free at: https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollbook-oa/book/9781035307173/9781035307173.xml

In this CGHE webinar series the authors of the newly released Edward Elgar book Assessing the contributions of higher education (edited by Simon Marginson, Brendan Cantwell, Daria Platonova and Anna Smolentseva) present ideas from their chapters and engage the participant audience on the key topic of how we can better understand – and improve – the contributions that higher education makes to societies across the world.

Despite the broad engagement of higher education institutions in most social sectors, limited thinking and hyper-individualistic approaches have dominated in discussions of their value to society. Advocating a more rigorous and comprehensive approach, Assessing the contributions of higher education discusses the broad range of contributions made by higher education and the many issues entailed in theorising, observing, measuring and evaluating those contributions.

Prepared by a group of leading international scholars, the chapters of Assessing the contributions of higher education investigate the multiple interconnections between higher education and society and the vast range of social, economic, political and cultural functions carried out by universities, colleges and institutes and their personnel. The benefits of higher education including employable graduates, new knowledge via research and scholarship, climate science and global connections, and the structuring of economic and social opportunities for whole populations, as well as work and advice for government at all levels. Higher education not only lifts earnings and augments careers, it also immerses students in knowledge, helps to shape them as people, and fosters productivity, democracy, tolerance and international understanding. International and interdisciplinary in scope, the book highlights the value added by higher education for persons, organisations, communities, cities, nations, and the world. It also focuses on inequalities in the distribution of that value, and finds that the tools for assessing higher education are neither adequate nor complete as yet. All of these themes and issues will be presented in the CGHE webinar series.

The underlying collaborative research project took place in 2018-2021 and was part funded by the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia, prior to the Russia/Ukraine war. The research also overlaps with the investigation in CGHE’s research project on ‘The public good role of higher education in ten countries: a comparative approach’.

Assessing the Contributions of Higher Education Crop