Horizontal diversity in higher education systems: does the growth of participation enhance or diminish it?
- Simon Marginson, UCL Institute of Education
Overview
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. ??
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Simon Marginson is Professor of International Higher Education at UCL Institute of Education, and Joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. He focuses on comparative international and global aspects of higher education, including systems and strategy, and higher education and equality. He is Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, and leads CGHE’s global higher education engagement research programme.
