Higher education participation and macro-economic fluctuations: a historical and comparative study

Debates about the connections and tensions between the creation and redistribution of wealth are important for evaluating the process of higher education’s expansion and its democratisation.

On the one hand, higher education is increasingly considered to have a strong influence on economic fluctuations and wealth creation and its redistribution. On the other hand, economic fluctuations not only affect the demand for higher education but also its supply by impacting on the level and public/private distribution of funding and provision available to the sector.

The potential tensions between trends in participation in higher education and macro-economic fluctuations raise substantial policy dilemmas which the project proposes to explore.

This project focused on the following questions:

1. What factors structure the historical relationship between economic fluctuations, inequality/equality, and higher education participation?
2. Under what socioeconomic conditions does growth or contraction in higher education take place? Can we identify similar and different relationships across countries?
3. Do socio-economic fluctuations affect the relationship between the dynamic of expansion and the process of stratification of higher education systems, and vice-versa?

The project :

• compared and contrasted trends and patterns in funding, participation and qualifications in higher education and key socio-economic aggregates since the 1920s;
• provided a comparative dimension with a focus on the UK, France and the USA – which have all reached mass higher education though different financial models;
• integrated local and institutional dimensions to examine what this tells us about the processes of institutional diversification or inequality that might be associated with the historical development of higher education systems.

CGHE working papers

• Expansion and differentiation in higher education: the historical trajectories of the UK, the USA and France
  (CGHE working paper 33, Vincent Carpentier, April 2018)

Additional publications

• Carpentier, V. (2021) Three Stories of Institutional Differentiation: Resource, Mission and Social Inequalities in Higher Education. Policy Reviews in Higher Education.
• Carpentier, V. and A. Courtois (2020) Public Good in French Universities: Principles and practices of the “Republican” Model of Higher education. Compare.
• Carpentier, V. (2017) Postface: Logiques d’expansion de l’enseignement supérieur, modèle de financement et professionnalisation : une approche historique. Formation Emploi, 138: 185-202

Other outputs

• Dynamics of public/private funding and the historical differentiation of higher education systems: the case of the UK, USA and France, Nordic Fields of Higher Education in International Comparison, Sciences Po Paris, 12-13 April 2018
• Expansion and institutional differentiation in higher education: historical trajectories of the UK, USA and France, Society for Research into Higher Education Annual Research Conference, Newport, 6-8 December 2017
• Higher education and socio-economic crises: lessons from 1929, 1973 and 2008
  Society for Research into Higher Education Annual Research Conference, Newport, December 2016
• A historical perspective on professional and vocational education and higher education systems in France and the UK
  Keynote for the Conference on Professionalisation and Higher Education: a comparative perspective, RESUP and GTES, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, June 2016
• A historical perspective on the origins of the transformation of the public-private funding structure of higher education and its implications
  Conference 435 Higher education and its mutations, 84th Annual Congress of the Francophone Association for Knowledge, UQAM, Montreal, May 2016
• The question of funding and the historical transformations of logics, spaces and contours of higher education systems (video)
  Colloquium 449 Administration in University Governance: progress or retreat?, 84th Annual Congress of the Francophone Association for Knowledge, UQAM, Montreal, May 2016