Regulated Isomorphic Competition and the Middle Layer of Institutions: High Participation Higher Education in Australia

This chapter provides a detailed and extensive assessment of Australia’s high participation systems (HPS) of higher education, in terms of the HPS propositions in relation to governance, horizontal diversity, vertical stratification, and equity. The propositions generally fit the country case. In Australia, the state has created a symbiotic relationship between the growth of participation and neo-liberal competition. Higher education institutions of all types within this system are impelled to grow, facilitating and legitimating expanding social demand for places. Australia’s ‘unified national system’ is a state regulated quasi market in which public universities carry out commercial activity, rather than a producer-driven commercial market. Social competition between families has been modified by standardized tuition charges and especially by income-contingent loans, and the government carefully sustains a large middle layer of universities that are competitive in the global market for fee-paying students. However, the hierarchy between artisanal and demand-responsive institutions remains steep.

Broad Access and Steep Stratification in the First Mass System: High Participation Higher Education in the United States of America

This chapter provides a detailed and extensive assessment of the United States of America’s (USA) high participation systems (HPS) of higher education. It considers the history of higher education, system development, and the present condition of higher education in the country. The USA was the first HPS and the American system remains globally influential. Higher education in the USA is a massive enterprise, defined by both excellent and dubious providers, broad inclusion, and steep inequality. The chapter further examines higher education in the USA in light of the seventeen HPS propositions. Perhaps more so than any other system, the American HPS conforms to the propositions. Notably, higher education in the USA is both more diverse horizontally, and stratified vertically, than most other HPS.

Vertical Stratification

This chapter considers national system stratification in high participation systems (HPS) of higher education. As demand for higher education increases, the social value of places within a system becomes more differentiated on a binary basis, between places offering exceptionally high positional value and others offering little value. Three prepositions about stratification are advanced. The first expands on the tendency to system bifurcation in HPS, with a small and elite ‘artisanal’ sector, mostly research-intensive universities, opposed to a larger and undistinguished ‘demand-absorbing’ sector. The second proposition identifies a set of drivers that push the bifurcation process. The third proposition recognizes that bifurcation is always incomplete and focuses on the contradictory dynamics of the ‘middle’ layer of higher education institutions in most HPS. Nationally specific factors that accentuate or limit stratification are identified.

Comparative Data on High Participation Systems

This chapter provides and discusses existing comparative data on higher education participation between various countries. The chapter starts with a review of the principal measures of participation, noting an inevitable tradeoff between optimum statistical measures and what is feasible given data limitations. After surveying participation in higher education in all countries, and noting that almost three-quarters have achieved enrolment ratios of at least 15 per cent, the chapter provides more detailed comparisons of the OECD member countries. The chapter proposes a composite Higher Education Participation Index which combines enrolment and output measures.

Towards Universal Access Amid Demographic Decline: High Participation Higher Education in Japan

This chapter provides a detailed and extensive assessment of Japan’s high participation system (HPS) of higher education, in historical perspective, and reflects on the changes in governance, functional differentiation, diversification between institutions in the form of vertical stratification, and the challenges for social equality and equity. The country case largely complies with the HPS propositions, with some national variations. The role of the state has been particularly important in shaping system differentiation; it has fostered functional diversification among universities and other post-secondary institutions, and has also concentrated public investment in selected universities. Stratification is enhanced by neo-liberal competition policy and the official positioning of the top universities as responding to globalization. The deliberate pursuit of functional diversification has modified the secular tendency to reduced diversity of institutional type, but not eliminated it. A shrinking population and economy have created more challenges for designing a sustainable future vision of higher education.

Building a New Society and Economy: High Participation Higher Education in Poland

This chapter provides a detailed and extensive assessment of Poland’s high participation system (HPS) of higher education. In contrast with other country cases, Poland’s leap from elite to mass to HPS higher education occurred very quickly, in two decades, after the breakdown of the socialist bloc. The Polish system first experienced both expansion and privatization, which then gave way to the opposite trends of contraction and de-privatization, due to the demographic decline and strengthened governmental regulation. The chapter uses the seventeen HPS propositions to discuss this history and the drivers of massification, governance, horizontal diversity, vertical stratification, and equity issues. The propositions generally fit very well with the country case.

Equity

The chapter discusses educational and social equity in the context of high participation systems (HPS) of higher education. It begins by discussing the terms ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ in a historical perspective. Noting that the growth of HPS is associated with more intensive competition at the entrance to elite higher education, the chapter develops four propositions in relation to equity in HPS: as systems expand, equity in the form of social inclusion is enhanced; growth is associated with increased stratification of higher education, and greater social inequality in educational and graduate outcomes, unless there is compensating state policy; the positional structure of the higher education system increasingly resembles that of society; and it becomes more difficult for states and institutions to redistribute social opportunities in education. In short, social inclusion via greater participation is more readily achieved, while an improved social mix in elite higher education institutions is more difficult to achieve.

Reproducing Social Equality across the Generations: The Nordic Model of High Participation Higher Education in Finland

This chapter provides a detailed and extensive assessment of Finland’s high participation system (HPS) of higher education, in a historical perspective and with focus on Finland’s core values of equality and equity. The country case challenges some of the HPS propositions. The Nordic model is built upon a distinctive cultural tradition in which the state administers a social consensus based on solidarity, equality, and trust, and higher education is of high quality and has equal esteem. Since World War II equality of opportunity has been central in national policymaking. The chapter focuses especially on the nature of access to higher education and continuing binary diversity between the university sector and the Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS, the former polytechnics) .While there is continuing social competition for access to elite professional programmes, and cultural capital provides certain families with advantages, the Finnish HPS is less competitive and stratified than other HPS.

High Participation Society

The chapter asks the ultimate question about high participation systems (HPS) of higher education: what kind of society is it when the majority of young people have higher education? It reviews theories and concepts developed in two disciplinary traditions: social sciences (structural functionalism, neo-institutionalism, etc.) and educational philosophy (Bildung and growth theory among others). Those two strands of scholarship highlight two key dimensions in the relations between higher education and society: the social/occupational structure, and socialization as human development/self-formation. The Bildung idea of a dual human nature, both determined by the world and being self-determining, largely corresponds to these two disciplinary approaches and opens up an intellectual space for further cross-disciplinary, multi-dimensional research on the meanings of HPS higher education for individuals and society.

Governance

This chapter finds that governance is necessarily complex in high participation systems (HPS) of higher education and discusses actual governance arrangements. Extensive social entanglement de-activates the boundaries that separate higher education from other social relations. Assuming these conditions hold for all HPS, three prepositions are advanced. The first posits that HPS are governed through complex, multi-level coordination and accountability processes. The second claims that governance involves the management of institutional differentiation. The third predicts that higher education intuitions develop robust corporate capacities to manage the more complex demands to which they are subjected. Although common conditions, as expressed through the propositions, are assumed to hold across all HPS, the chapter recognizes that no two systems of higher education have the same governance arraignments, and considers various national contingencies.