Understanding Mass Higher Education.7.Pdf

Understanding Mass Higher Education In recent decades most developed nations have experienced a shift from elite to mass higher education, with the United States leading the way. This book compares the experience of this very important social change within different nation states. Whilst recognising the critical global economic forces that appear to explain the international nature of the change, it sees the issues as rooted within different national traditions. There is a particular focus upon the discourse of access, especially the political discourse. The book addresses questions such as: • How has expansion been explained? • Has expansion been generated by state intervention or by a combina- tion of economic and social forces? • What are the forms of political intervention? • What points of agreement and conflict are generated within the wider society by expanding access? Leading academics explore the ways in which different systems of higher education have accommodated mass access, constructing comparative pic- tures and comparative interpretations and lessons in an accessible and informative style. This book should be critical reading for students in education, sociology and politics, as well as policy-makers and academics. Ted Tapper is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex, Brighton, and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies. David Palfreyman is Bursar at New College, Oxford, and Direc- tor of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies (oxcheps.new.ox.ac.uk). Understanding Mass Higher Education Comparative perspectives on access Edited by Ted Tapper and David Palfreyman Woburn Education Series First published 2005 by RoutledgeFalmer 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeFalmer 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Ted Tapper and David Palfreyman, selection and editorial matter; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-00153-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-35491-9 (Print Edition) Contents Preface vii Contributors xii 1 The rise of mass higher education 1 TED TAPPER AND DAVID PALFREYMAN 2 Values, discourse and politics: an Australian comparative perspective 6 CHRIS DUKE 3 The politics of access to higher education in France 28 CÉCILE DEER 4 Bildung or Ausbildung? Reorienting German higher education 51 HANNA OSTERMANN 5 The value of higher education in a mass system: the Italian debate 76 SIMONETTA MICHELOTTI 6 Access to Dutch higher education: policies and trends 92 FRANS KAISER AND HANS VOSSENSTEYN 7 Access to higher education in the Nordic countries 121 PER OLAF AAMODT AND SVEIN KYVIK vi Contents 8 Mass higher education in Poland: coping with the ‘Spanish Collar’ 139 CLARE McMANUS-CZUBIN´ SKA 9 British higher education and the prism of devolution 160 GARETH PARRY 10 Access to higher education in England: who is in control? 190 TED TAPPER 11 A transatlantic persuasion: a comparative look at America’s path towards access and equity in higher education 211 JOHN DOUGLASS 12 Conclusion: the reshaping of mass higher education 247 TED TAPPER AND DAVID PALFREYMAN Index 262 Preface The genesis of this book lay in the interest of the editors in watching the debate unfold in the past five years or so within the UK over expanding access to, and widening participation in, higher education; what, indeed, we may term a row over ‘the politics of access’. The debate, whilst usually framed in the language of social equity, institutional autonomy and educa- tional standards, occasionally degenerates into cheap political jibes founded in the tendency of the British to take any opportunity to fight yet another battle in their centuries-old class war. The current conflict passed through a critical stage as the Higher Education Bill 2004 wound it way through parliament, a process which furnishes us with some of the quota- tions set out below from the ensuing endless stream of articles in the press and from the Bill’s lengthy second reading session in the Commons. The essence of the cause for concern is whether higher education, as a quasi-public good substantially financed by the state through general taxa- tion, is being disproportionately consumed by the children of the middle classes. In particular, do the more privileged socio-economic groups domi- nate access to the prestigious universities, and more especially Oxford and Cambridge. To what extent do the children from less privileged social backgrounds become undergraduates at ‘elite’ universities, or in fact even participate in higher education? Seemingly, the answer to the first part of the question is ‘Hardly at all’, and to the second, ‘Not nearly to the extent of children from better off families’. Has the picture changed over the decades as higher education in the UK ‘massified’ (belatedly by US and European norms)? Apparently there has been some improvement, but the doubling of the size of the UK system of higher education since the mid- 1980s has meant that going to university has become almost universal for middle-class children, while still leaving the age participation index (API) of the lowest two of the five socio-economic groups (essentially those from working-class families) significantly trailing even if it has more than doubled over the past twenty years. Was this issue, we wondered, of social equity in access to higher education also alive, and if so as lively debated, in other countries? We were aware that for many decades access had been a political issue in the USA viii Preface in terms of the opportunity for racial and ethnic minorities to go to college and of the resultant affirmative action policies pursued by many universities, and litigated over at the highest level of the US court hierarchy. But did the Americans worry whether poor whites went to the local public university or even community college, let alone to the private, high-tuition- fee Ivy League universities? Do the French, we asked, keep access data, as do the British, by way of recording parental occupations and analysing the postcode of the family homes of the incoming student cohorts so as to determine their socio-economic backgrounds? Do the French know, or care, about the class origins of students at the Sorbonne or at the Grandes Ecoles as opposed to those at the provincial universities? Are equity issues even on the Italian policy agenda given the scale of the problems generated by the rapid, but underfunded, access to higher education in Italy? Is a German senior government minister likely to enter the access debate, assuming it is even an issue on the political radar as to who goes to which university, as did Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown in publicly chal- lenging Oxford’s decision not to offer an undergraduate place to study medicine to Ms Laura Spence? She was an academically talented schoolgirl with top A-level grades, but allegedly burdened with the twin disadvantage of coming from the unfashionable north of England and also attending a state school (as opposed to an independent, private school) – and even worse it was a school of the type that, in another political context, a senior government adviser called ‘a bog standard comprehensive school’ (a local high school in contrast to those few remaining state schools that select their pupils according to academic ability at age 11). The protestations of Oxford that almost all its applicants possess such top A-level grades and that, inevitably, some have to be rejected was not an easy message to communicate in the midst of a media furore. And the fact that Ms Spence subsequently accepted a scholarship to study instead at Harvard simply added fuel to the fire. Is any other country, we mused, about to create a regulatory authority (as proposed in the Higher Education Bill 2004) charged with ensuring that universities unable to comply with their social equity access targets should have their public funding reduced? This new regulator, the ‘Office for Fair Access’, is symbolic of the access discourse in the UK, but, as far as we knew, unknown elsewhere. Perhaps in other countries with well-established mass systems of higher education, we thought, access is seen to have long since been adequately addressed by a fairly open and easy entry route. But do such countries then concern themselves, as the British do, with recording and analysing non-completion/retention (once known as ‘drop out’) rates and asking whether students from poorer family backgrounds are more likely to leave or be failed before graduating? Or has the focus been on a broader set of questions? Who pays for expanded access? And, what is its impact upon the meaning and experience of higher education? So, it was this range of questions that we had in mind as we sought to put together a team of colleagues each willing to write an essay on the Preface ix politics of access to higher education in his or her country.

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