Book Launch

High participation systems of higher education

Date: Thursday, 29 November 2018 3:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Location: Seminar Room A, Department of Education, Oxford University

Speaker(s):

Paul Ashwin, Lancaster University
Simon Marginson, University of Oxford
Brendan Cantwell, Michigan State University
Anna Smolentseva, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Alis Oancea, University of Oxford

Higher education has become a central institution of society, building individual knowledge, skills, agency, and relational social networks at unprecedented depth and scale.

Within a generation there has been an extraordinary global expansion of higher education, in every region in all but the poorest countries, outstripping economic growth and deriving primarily from familial aspirations for betterment.

By focusing on the systems and countries that have already achieved near universal participation, High Participation Systems of Higher Education explores this remarkable transformation. The world enrolment ratio, now rising by 10 per cent every decade, is approaching 40 per cent, mostly in degree-granting institutions, including three-quarters of young people in North America and Europe. Higher education systems in the one in three countries that enrol more than 50 per cent are here classified as ‘high participation systems’.

Part I of the book measures, maps, and explains the growth of participation, and the implications for society and higher education itself. Drawing on a wide range of literature and data, the chapters theorise the changes in governance, institutional diversity, and stratification in higher education systems, and the subsequent effects in educational and social equity.

The theoretical propositions regarding high participation higher education developed in these chapters are then tested in the country case studies in Part II, presenting a comprehensive enquiry into the nature of the emerging ‘high participation society’.

Professor Paul Ashwin

Paul Ashwin is Professor of Higher Education, Lancaster University. He played a key role in creating CGHE, was a CGHE Deputy Director and led the Centre’s Graduate Experiences of Employability and Knowledge project.

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.

Brendan Cantwell

Brendan Cantwell is Associate Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education in Michigan State University’s Department of Educational Administration. He is also co-editor of The Handbook of Politics of Higher Education (with Hamish Coates and Roger King) and is a coordinating editor for the journal Higher Education.

Anna Smolentseva

Anna Smolentseva is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Education, National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Alis Oancea

Alis Oancea is Professor of Philosophy of Education and Research Policy and Director of Research in the department. She specialises in studies of research policy and governance and in philosophy of research – including work on research assessment, impact and knowledge exchange, research funding, research quality, evaluation, open knowledge practices, research ethics, capacity, publication practices, and the cultural value of research in the arts and the humanities.