Policy change in higher education

Abstract

Following developments in the 1980s, the 1990s seem to promise for many governments and societies an increasing concern about the role and relevance of their respective higher education systems. This concern seems to be brought about by several factors such as financial stringency, increased demand, effective articulation between higher and other education sectors, labour market priorities, aging populations, changes in the structure of the 'welfare state', and the interests of minority groups. Increasing participation and the transformation of higher education from 'elite' to 'mass' systems inevitably leads to much larger community involvement and makes higher education more of a 'political issue'. Financial pressures, and the wish of governments to get more value per dollar, appear to be driving higher education systems to change, as does the wish for higher education to be more closely tied to national economies, both in terms of meeting national labour market needs and through research discovering new products or resources. Many national systems of higher education are experiencing profound change. Nearly everywhere, governments are asking their respective higher education systems to participate more effectively and efficiently in producing a better educated, culturally enriched, and more economically secure society. Over the last few years, substantial system restructuring has occurred in several countries with the expressed intention of creating more flexible, adaptive, accessible, and responsive higher education institutions. Some governments, for example, are changing socalled binary systems of higher education into unitary ones; other governments seem to be doing the opposite; still other governments are attempting to encourage greater educational diversity while maintaining the organizational status quo. While the desire seems to be for more diverse and adaptive higher education systems, the process of change and barriers to it are not well understood. Various forcesincluding government policy itselfappear to divert attempts to create more flexible and diversified higher education systems. A clear example of this is the process of the 'homogenization' of higher education, a process which seems to involve an 'upward drift' of institutional goals, characteristics, and functions towards the top of an institutional status hierarchy. Some theoretical work on the stratification of higher education systems and empirical investigations of national higher education structures in terms of the governance and distribution of power within higher education have been carried out. However, there appears to be a need for comparative studies to assess how specific policies are achieved or diverted from their intended purpose by the way in which structures and systems of stratification interact with these policies. While