The structure of higher education: A world view

Abstract

This conference is about the implications of mass higher education; and I have to give a world-view in 45 minutes! If my theme is to be clear a few of these minutes must be spent on a semantic distinction. The semantic distinction is best introduced by an analogy: everyone ought to have as much food as he needs, but not everyone needs or wants to be fed on caviare. Which, transposed into the key of this address, is that everyone in a society which can afford mass education is entitled to as much education (primary, secondary, post-secondary) as he needs, but not everyone needs or wants what we in Britain call higher as contrasted with further education. But this Conference has pre-empted the term higher education, and you are an international audience; so it cannot be restricted in the way commonly understood in Britain. I have assumed that higher education, as pre-empted in the title of this conference, includes all post-secondary education, and I am going to draw a distinction between vocational higher education on the one hand and non-vocational higher education on the other hand. Notice that this distinction cuts across some familiar boundaries. It puts into the same category the education provided by the faculty of medicine at Cambridge and by the department of catering at Colchester technical college, and it puts into the same category Oxford Greats and WEA courses on archaeology. Of course the boundaries between vocational and non-vocational higher education are blurred, but by and large vocational higher education qualifies a person to pursue a specific vocation or profession; non-vocational higher education does not. It may seem a perverse distinction, but I hope to show that it does make sense. Higher education, defined in this way, is certain to become more than a minority interest. It has already, in two generations, increased by an order of magnitude, and it will do so again before the end of this century. That is why this conference has been called. That is why several countries have carried out sophisticated exercises such as the Robbins Report, the reports of the Wissenschaftsrat in Germany, and the colossal