Does Augar provide the way forward for HE and FE in England? A CGHE panel

Lorraine Dearden is Professor of Economics at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society and was a CGHE Co-Investigator on the former Project 2.2, ‘HE choices and post-HE destinations to age 25: parental background and effects of higher education funding reform in the UK’.

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.

Gareth Parry researches system change and policy reform in higher education, nationally and internationally. He established CGHE’s local higher education engagement research programme.

Michael Shattock is a Co-Investigator on CGHE’s global higher education engagement research programme.