‘Post-war’ to post-millennium

Abstract

This chapter explores the wider concepts needed to make sense of the evolution of higher education systems across the globe. It emphasizes that the development of mass higher education in the UK since 1960 did not take place in a vacuum. Many of the changes that have taken place, whether in terms of national policy, institutional missions, organisational culture or teaching and research, cannot properly be explained without some consideration of the wider political, social, economic, and cultural context. The chapter discusses the political changes from the 1960s to Brexit five decades later; the major themes such as over-centralisation of political power and decision making, and the replacement of consensus by new adversarial politics; the changing economic contexts, including the death of industrial England and the rise of neoliberal finance; and wider social change, such as the erosion of old solidarities and the rise of new ‘identities’ against a background of increasing inequalities, and a cultural revolution, rooted in the advance of social liberalism and the unbundling of traditional forms and structures of creative expression in the context of instantaneity, brands and celebrity.