Horizontal diversity in higher education systems: does the growth of participation enhance or diminish it?

Date: Thursday, 6 July 2017 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Location: Room 728, UCL Institute of Education
Speaker(s):
  • Simon Marginson, UCL Institute of Education

Overview

Higher education research and scholarship have devoted much energy to questions of the three-way relationship between the growth of participation, market competition, and horizontal diversity between institutions (meaning distinctions of institutional mission or type).

Professor Marginson reviews the scholarly evidence, reflects on the outcomes of a recent review of high participation higher education in eight countries, and draws conclusions about the main tendencies in the configuration of higher education systems and institutions.

The bulk of the empirical evidence suggests that an enhanced role for markets is associated with an increase in imitating behaviour and the narrowing of mission differences, rather than diversity.

In relation to growth, it is difficult to separate the effects of expanding participation from contextual factors, but the overall tendencies appear to be (1) an increase in vertical stratification, (2) growth in the importance of large multi-disciplinary multi-purpose institutions, (3) a decline in horizontal diversity overall, and (4) an increase in internal diversity within larger institutions. ??

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