Book Launch

Higher education and the common good

Date: Wednesday, 18 January 2017 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Location: Clarke Hall, UCL Institute of Education

Speaker(s):

Simon Marginson, University of Oxford and University of Bristol

Chair: Professor Becky Francis (Director, UCL Institute of Education)
Remarks by Dame Nicola Brewer (Vice-Provost International, UCL)

Background

In a new book entitled Higher education and the common good, Professor Marginson argues that higher education has a key role in rebuilding social solidarity and mobility in fractured societies.

In the last half century higher education has moved from the fringe to the centre of society and accumulated a long list of functions. In the English-speaking world, Europe and much of East Asia more than two thirds of all school students enter tertiary education.

Bulging at the seams, universities are meant to be fountains of new knowledge, engines of prosperity and innovation, drivers of regional growth, skilled migration and global competitiveness, and makers of equality of opportunity.

Yet universities cannot drive prosperity on their own and they can do little to stop rising income inequality, which is shaped by taxation policy and income determination in the workplace. Worse, the growing emphasis on the private benefits of higher education, without regard for its public benefits, has positioned the higher education sector as elite forming, as a maker of social inequality rather than a corrective to it.

In the English-speaking countries, in which government sees itself as servant of high capitalism, official policy models higher education as a market and has narrowed its purpose to the enhancement of individual earnings and employability, partly to justify the ever-rising tuition fees.

Higher education systems have become intensely competitive and increasingly stratified, with value concentrated at the top. In this quasi-aristocratic economics of education, mass institutions are losing social value and the collective public benefits of universities are unmonitored, underfunded and ignored.

In short, governments expect both too much and too little of higher education, and its contribution to the common good is being eroded. Yet this sector can play a key role in rebuilding social solidarity and mobility in fractured societies.

Higher education and the common good is published by Melbourne University Press (MUP), and is available in hardback, paperback and as an e-book.

Launch video

Watch a video of the book launch:

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education with emeritus status at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in China and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne in Australia, and also Joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. Simon was the founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), which he led between 2015 and 2024. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods. With Lili Yang, Simon co-authored a 2022 paper ‘Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches’ which found that if the Anglophone economic notion of a zero-sum trade-off between public goods and private goods is removed, then the full range of higher education’s contributions emerge and the two systemic approaches to the public good role are compatible despite differences in the respective political cultures. Simon’s most recent book, authored with CGHE researcher Vassiliki Papatsiba of Cardiff University, is Brexit, EU students and UK higher education: Broken bridges, published by Bloomsbury Academic in August 2025. Forthcoming, also from CGHE research, are The future of cross-border academic mobility and immobility: Power, knowledge and agency, edited by Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery and Ravinder Sidhu (Bloomsbury Academic, December 2025); and the sole authored Simon Marginson, Global higher education in times of upheaval: On common goods, geopolitics and decolonisation (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2026). All three of these books are available for free download on an Open Access basis with the support of UKRI. You can contact Simon at simon.marginson@bristol.ac.uk or simon.marginson@education.ox.ac.uk