High Participation Systems of Higher Education

The chapter introduces the remarkable worldwide growth of participation in higher education, defines higher and tertiary education, and discusses and critiques the principal explanations for educational growth, from the path-breaking study by Martin Trow of the transition from elite to mass to universal higher education, to institutional theory and economic explanations. After discussing methods of theorization and comparison it introduces the contents of the chapters that follow, delineating key themes explored in the book: the dynamics of growth, driven primarily by family aspirations for betterment, the convergence between higher education and society, the rise of the corporate multi-purpose university (the ‘multiversity’), the meanings of educational massification for individual agency, and social (in)equality.