Over the last 40 years, UK higher education has moved from a publicly funded system to a mixed publicly/privately funded system regulated as a tuition loans-based consumer market, in which both the student as graduate, and the higher education institution, are responsible for a significant proportion of total costs. It is nevertheless subject to robust government control. This is partly exercised indirectly through comparative assessments of institutional performance by public agencies that define common objectives and install a hierarchy based on measured performance, helping to differentiate HEIs within the market. Institutions remain partly dependent on government funding in the forms of research-related support, teaching subsidies and subsidization of the loan system through non-repayment of debt. The 2012 introduction of a £9000 maximum fee for full-time students and £6750 for part-time students in England, based on income-contingent repayment arrangements, was associated with a net increase in funding, growth in full-time first degree students, and a sharp fall in part-time and mature age students. Part-time students begin repayments four years after the commencement of their course of study. The long-term cost of the student loans scheme is uncertain and its sustainability is in question. After 15 years of declining funding for students, total systemic funding rose by 50% between 2000 and 2015 and per student funding also rose, mainly benefiting the research-intensive universities in the Russell group. These universities benefit most from funds allocated through the government’s periodic national research assessments.
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The evolution of a large and dynamic global system of science has been a major development of the Internet era. The networked system, grounded in autonomous collegial activity, is associated with rapid growth in papers, the spread of science infrastructure to a growing number of countries, and the rise of new science powers outside Euro-America. The United States remains the strongest country in shaping authoritative knowledge but China excels in total papers and in some STEM disciplines. Yet despite the fact of a more multi-polar world, in economic capacity, political agency and scientific output, there is continued Euro-American domination in the content of science, regulated by an inside/outside binary which reproduces the old North/South and West/East hierarchies. Global science is unequalising and homogenising, and primarily Anglo-American in language, leading institutions, disciplinary and publishing regimes, agendas and topics. Non-English language work and endogenous knowledges are excluded. Scholarship on global science does not effectively address these issues. The fascination with bibliometrics merely reproduces the inside/outside binary: all of those conducting scientometric research and the university rankings based on bibliometric data are complicit in the fiction that the knowledge stored in the commercial repositories of Web of Science and Scopus is all that needs to be known. Not all of the critical work on global science has been helpful either. The paper critiques the dominant imaginary of world science, worldsystems theory with its centre-periphery model. This theory fails to grasp the dynamics of the specifically global system, and radically under-estimates agency outside the ‘centre’ countries, as shown by the manner in which nation-states and autonomous researchers on the ‘semi-periphery’ and ‘periphery’ have been able to rapidly develop science. The centre-periphery model is unduly determinist, in the outcome reinforcing the Eurocentrism it opposes. The paper argues for a critique of hegemony not centre-periphery, focusing on cultural factors as well as political economy, and for an ‘ecology of knowledges’ approach as the way forward.
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Worldwide participation in higher education now includes one-third of the age cohort and is growing at an unprecedented rate. The tendency to rapid growth, leading towards high participation systems (HPS), has spread to most middle-income and some low-income countries. Though expansion of higher education requires threshold development of the state and the middle class, it is primarily powered not by economic growth but by the ambitions of families to advance or maintain social position. However, expansion is mostly not accompanied by more equal social access to elite institutions. The quality of mass higher education is often problematic. Societies vary in the extent of upward social mobility from low-socio-economic-status backgrounds. The paper explores the intersection between stratified social backgrounds and the stratifying structures in HPS. These differentiating structures include public/private distinctions in schooling and higher education, different fields of study, binary systems and tiered hierarchies of institutions, the vertical 'stretching' of stratification in competitive HPS, and the unequalising effects of tuition. Larger social inequalities set limits on what education can achieve. Countries with high mobility sustain a consensus about social equality, and value rigorous and autonomous systems of learning, assessment and selection in education.
This chapter provides a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics between higher education and globalisation.It then reviews a range of related strategic elements relevant to both countries and higher education institutions.Against this background, the chapter reflects the relative global positions of different higher education systems, with a particular focus on research capacity and performance.The chapter concludes by reflecting on how globalisation is altering the traditional relationship between higher education and national environment.
The formal and public domain of international student security in Australia is constituted by the ESOS Act, which defines in a particular way the relationship between nation-state, institutional providers and the student consumer. It is also shaped by the conditions governing student visas; and affected by higher education policy and funding, and processes of accreditation and quality assurance (not discussed in detail here).
However, I disagree with his article above. I don't think that Ian has succeeded in laying to rest the education politics of of the 1970s and 1980s, although he has uncovered some limitations and weaknesses. Nor has he succeeded in justifying what he sees as the alternative: the meritocratic practices of grading, sorting and selecting in education, which were the unquestioned orthodoxy of the 1950s and most of the 1960s, and still dominate the educa tion system. Hunter sees the demand for in education in nar row terms, as the demand for equality of qualification, a refusal by teachers to engage in these practices of grading and selecting to the extent that limits are placed on what students can do after they leave education. This has been an important form of educational equality, but it is not the only form.
The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries, brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s strongest system of public research universities. The California idea, combining excellence with access within a tiered system of higher education, and underpinned by a taxpayer consensus on the common good inherent in equality of opportunity in education, became the leading model for higher education across the world. Yet the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. The taxpayer consensus broke down two decades after the Master Plan began and California no longer provides the fiscal conditions necessary to ensure both excellence and access, especially access for non-white and immigrant families. Many students are now turned away, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face resource challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader in the United States, lags far behind. The article traces the rise and partial fall of the Californian system of higher education as embodied in the Master Plan, and draws out lessons for other countries in general, and China in particular.
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Internationalisation has been considered as a key strategy by the Vietnamese government to enhance the quality of the higher education system, enabling it to augment human capacity building for the country and contribute more effectively to the national development....
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Against the context of higher education expansion initiated in 1998, this Special Issue sets out to critically examine the major developmental trends in higher education in China. The present article sets out the broader policy context for the Special Issue with particular focus on reviewing the rapid expansion of higher education in the last two decades. More specifically, this article discusses the higher education development trends in China through the massification, diversification and internationalisation processes in transforming the higher education system. This article also highlights the major arguments of the articles being selected for this Issue.
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