CGHE Webinar 35

Clark Kerr, the Master Plan and public higher education in California today

Date: Thursday, 17 November 2016 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location: Room 432, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 16 Taviton Street, WC1H 0BW

Speaker(s):

Simon Marginson, University of Oxford

Simon Marginson examines the crisis of public higher education in the US – even though higher education along American lines is flourishing in many countries abroad. This seminar is based on Professor Marginson’s new book, The dream is over: the crisis of Clark Kerr’s California idea of higher education.

While the Californian model of higher education has been the most influential single model in shaping university systems worldwide, it has been profoundly eroded at home.

Amid an increasingly unequal economy and society in the US, access to higher education for all in California has been lost and even the brilliant science-based universities are now under long-term threat of losing ground to domestic and foreign competitors.

Professor Marginson looks at the reasons behind the reluctance of the middle class taxpayer and the political system to maintain the California Master Plan vision of higher education. He highlights the fiscal incapacity of US states to support public higher education, and proposes an overhaul of the student loans system as a potential solution, with income contingent loans replacing the present mortgage-style loans.

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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.