Demands and Policies for Higher Education

Routledge eBooks, 2015

The global expansion of higher education Alternative perspectives The century-long expansion of higher education Higher education is one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy today. Between 1815 and the period shortly after World War I, there was very little growth in the number of young adults attending colleges or universities, but starting in the 1920s, the number of students began to expand at an intensifying rate in the advanced capitalist world. By 1940, there were approximately five million university students worldwide. By 1960, this number had doubled to ten million (Schofer and Meyer, 2005). Fifty years later, in 2010, more than 177 million students were attending colleges and universities in all of the world's regions (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2012: 228). This increase represents a 5.9 percent annual growth rate in enrollments. If this rate of growth continues, the tertiary education population of students will nearly double every 12 years. To highlight the extraordinary nature of the trend, Schofer and Meyer point out that, today, there are approximately as many students attending colleges and universities in Kazakhstan as there were in the entire globe a century ago (Schofer and Meyer, 2005: 3). It is important to stress that nearly all regions of the world have been a part of this process. Western Europe, North America and Japan have the most tertiary students per capita-approximately 350 students per every 10,000 people-but Eastern Europe, after experiencing relatively slow growth in college education during the Communist period, has largely caught up to its Western neighbors. After the major OECD nations, Eastern Europe, the Arab world and Latin America have the highest share of college and university students in the total population. In addition, the student population of the East Asian and Pacific region is growing very rapidly. According to UNESCO, the student body in China has expanded by 19 percent per year during the first decade of this century. There are exceptions to these trends. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh's student bodies have grown more slowly, and sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest proportion of college students in its population, although growth is so rapid that UNESCO estimates that the number of students will double every 8.4 years (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2009). This growth is associated with significant regional changes in the composition of the university student body. There has been a sharp rise in the share of students

2020

The rapid increase of student enrolment during the 1960s and 1970s in economically advanced countries triggered intensive discourses about necessary structural changes of the higher education systems and possible concurrent functional changes , The varied terms used to describe major expected, desired and realized changes indicate a variety of value judgements: Diversification, vertical stratification and “massification” of higher education as well as “educational meritocracy”, “knowledge society” and “highly educated society”. The changing challenges felt and the search for new solutions created also a favourable climate the emergence of higher education research, which aimed at better explanations and for more empirical evidence. During these decades and during the subsequent decades, other similar challenges were felt in most countries: Changes in the relationships between higher education and the world of work, changing expectations and conditions as regards the academic profess...

1998

An important theme underlying the reform agenda is an avowed orientation to expansion and diversification, driven by the demands of a growing, upwardly mobile (or at least upwardly aspiring) population and to the needs of an increasingly competitive, technologically-sophisticated economy.

2002

Note on the number and size of institutions Note on enrollment and completion ratios Note on expenditure comparisons Note on apprenticeship in the United States and Germany vi 5 INTRODUCTION Higher education is a very important component of most countries' education systems. In most developed countries, over a third of young adults in the typical higher education age range are students. Modern societies now demand large numbers of graduates with knowledge and skills typically developed in higher education institutions, and they compensate those graduates more than in the past for the acquisition of those skills. Indeed, in the most developed countries, higher education has replaced secondary education as the focal point of access to rewarding careers. What has been said of U.S. job seekers is also true for those in most other developed countries: given current technologies in transportation, communication, and trade, if a worker's skills are no better than those of poorly educated, low-paid workers in less-developed countries, that worker is likely to face tough economic pressure. The purpose of this report is to provide a review of higher education systems in selected developed countries and to compare higher education in the United States and other countries. Our "focus group" of countries This report will not be useful if the comparisons across countries are not valid, however. The most basic assumption justifying this effort proposes that observing the country variation in educational indicators can be instructive-instructive by placing our own system in the context of others and instructive in benchmarking the "best practices" of other countries to ours. Ideally, country-level comparisons are most useful among like or competitive countries. Unfortunately for this comparison, there is really no other country quite like the United States on dimensions such as geographical size, population, wealth, and governance structure. We therefore Higher Education: An International Perspective 3 7 a Small: less than 25, 000 square miles; medium: 25,001 to 75,000; large: greater than 75,000. b Small: less than 30 million persons; medium: 30 million to 100 million; large: greater than 100 million.