Higher Education and Social Inclusion: Continuing Inequalities in Access to Higher Education in England

Author(s):  
Philip Woodward
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Balbachevsky ◽  
Helena Sampaio ◽  
Cibele Yahn De Andrade

This article adopts an historical institutionalism perspective (Pierson, 2011; Pierson & Skocpol, 2002; Thelen, 2014). Its main goal is to understand the lasting dynamics and path dependency processes that constrain the impact of expanding access to higher education (HE) in changing the pattern of social inequalities in a given country. To do this, the article will explore two different aspects of the impact of education on social inclusion: the dynamics associated with production and distribution of portable skills and competences, and the dynamics associated with social stratification. The study follows the experience of Brazilian HE over the last 15 years. In this period, the country experienced a rapid expansion, coming from a total undergraduate enrolment of 2.7 million in 2000 up to nine million in 2016. Nevertheless, the design of this expansion assumed a very conservative pattern. Following a well-ingrained domestic pattern, most of this expansion was absorbed by the country’s huge demand-driven private sector, and into less than half a dozen very traditional types of bachelor programs. Thus, the article argues that by failing to diversify, and by preserving old institutional hierarchies, expanding access to HE in Brazil has rendered less impact than one would expect on the country’s social inequalities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anete Veidemane ◽  
Frans Kaiser ◽  
Daniela Craciun

Measuring access to higher education for underrepresented groups is a relevant yet challenging task. The article shows that while social inclusion is recognised as a priority, policymakers, academics, and institutional leaders struggle to define, operationalise, and measure it. This makes answering the question of what constitutes a socially inclusive higher education institution quite difficult. While the answer to this question may be context‐specific, there is a clear need for a set of commonly defined indicators that allow higher education institutions to measure their progress throughout time and in relation to others. The article synthesises insights from policy, practise, and scientific research to identify which indicators are the most promising for assessing the access of under‐representative students to higher education. By discussing indicator relevance, validity and feasibility, the article contributes to the quest for internationally comparable social inclusion indicators of underrepresented student groups.


Author(s):  
Stacey Kim Coates ◽  
Michelle Trudgett ◽  
Susan Page

Abstract There is clear evidence that Indigenous education has changed considerably over time. Indigenous Australians' early experiences of ‘colonialised education’ included missionary schools, segregated and mixed public schooling, total exclusion and ‘modified curriculum’ specifically for Indigenous students which focused on teaching manual labour skills (as opposed to literacy and numeracy skills). The historical inequalities left a legacy of educational disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Following activist movements in the 1960s, the Commonwealth Government initiated a number of reviews and forged new policy directions with the aim of achieving parity of participation and outcomes in higher education between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Further reviews in the 1980s through to the new millennium produced recommendations specifically calling for Indigenous Australians to be given equality of access to higher education; for Indigenous Australians to be employed in higher education settings; and to be included in decisions regarding higher education. This paper aims to examine the evolution of Indigenous leaders in higher education from the period when we entered the space through to now. In doing so, it will examine the key documents to explore how the landscape has changed over time, eventually leading to a number of formal reviews, culminating in the Universities Australia 2017–2020 Indigenous Strategy (Universities Australia, 2017).


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-191
Author(s):  
Eric Burton

AbstractFrom the late 1950s, Africans seeking higher education went to a rapidly increasing number of destinations, both within Africa and overseas. Based on multi-sited archival research and memoirs, this article shows how Africans forged and used new routes to gain access to higher education denied to them in their territories of origin, and in this way also shaped scholarship policies across the globe. Focusing on British-ruled territories in East Africa, the article establishes the importance of African intermediaries and independent countries as hubs of mobility. The agency of students and intermediaries, as well as official responses, are examined in three interconnected cases: the clandestine ‘Nile route’ from East Africa to Egypt and eastern Europe; the ‘airlifts’ from East Africa to North America; and the ‘exodus’ of African students from the Eastern bloc to western Europe. Although all of these routes were short-lived, they transformed official scholarship provisions, and significantly shaped the postcolonial period in the countries of origin.


Author(s):  
Peter Shea ◽  
Alexandra Pickett ◽  
Chun Sau Li

<p>Online learning environments provide an unprecedented opportunity to increase student access to higher education. Accomplishing this much needed goal requires the active participation and cooperation of university faculty from a broad spectrum of institutional settings. Although online learning has seen rapid growth in recent years, it remains a relatively small percentage of the entire curriculum of higher education today. As a relatively recent development, online teaching can be viewed through the lens of diffusion of innovation research. This paper reports on research from 913 professors from community colleges, four-year colleges, and university centers in an attempt to determine potential barriers to the continued growth in adoption of online teaching in higher education. It is concluded through factor and regression analysis that four variables are significantly associated with faculty satisfaction and their likelihood, therefore, to adopt or continue online teaching – these include levels of interaction in their online course, technical support, a positive learning experience in developing and teaching the course, and the discipline area in which they taught. Recommendations for institutional policy, faculty development, and further research are included. </p> <p><b>Keywords: </b>online teaching, faculty satisfaction, faculty development, diffusion of innovation, access, higher education, study </p>


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