Human capital theory assumes that education determines the marginal productivity of labour and this determines earnings. Since the 1960s, it has dominated the economics, and policy and public ...understanding, of relations between education and work. It has become widely assumed that intellectual formation constitutes a mode of economic capital, higher education is preparation for work, and primarily education (not social background) determines graduate outcomes. However, human capital theory fails the test of realism, due to weaknesses of method: use of a single theoretical lens and closed system modelling, inappropriate application of mathematical tools, and multi-variate analysis of interdependent variables. Human capital theory imposes a single linear pathway on the complex passage between heterogeneous education and work. It cannot explain how education augments productivity, or why salaries have become more unequal, or the role of status. These limitations are discussed with reference to research on social stratification, work, earnings and education.
The public/private distinction is central to higher education but there is no consensus on 'public'. In neo-classical economic theory, Samuelson distinguishes non-market goods (public) that cannot be ...produced for profit, from market-based activity (private). This provides a basis for identifying the minimum necessary public expenditure, but does not effectively encompass collective goods, or normative elements. In political theory 'public' is often understood as state ownership and/or control. Dewey regards social transactions as 'public' when they have relational consequences for persons other than those directly engaged, and so become matters of state concern. This is more inclusive than Samuelson but without limit on costs. Neither definition is wholly satisfactory, each offers something, and each can be used to critically interrogate the other. The article synthesises the two approaches, applying the resulting analytical framework with four quadrants (civil society, social democracy, state quasi-market and commercial market) to higher education and research.
In research in cross-cultural psychology, international education is largely understood as an "adjustment" to host country norms and institutions, a notion that prioritizes social order and ...stability. The student is seen as in deficit in relation to these norms. The student's home country identity becomes seen as a barrier to be broken down. In contrast, this article sees higher education, and within that international education, as a process of self-formation within conditions of disequilibrium in which student subjects manage their lives reflexively, fashioning their own changing identities, albeit under social circumstances largely beyond their control. International students form their self-trajectories somewhere between home country identity (which continues to evolve in the country of education), host country identity, and a larger set of cosmopolitan options. In piloting their pathways they draw on multiple identities and fashion new forms of hybrid identity. The article highlights the need for international education programs to strengthen the agency freedom of students, and its scope and resources, to facilitate this educational process of self-formation. (HoF/text adopted).
For more than two decades, governments around the world, led by the English-speaking polities, have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. Reforms include ...corporatisation, competitive funding, student charges, output formats and performance reporting. But, no country has established a bona fide economic market in the first-degree education of domestic students. No research university is driven by shareholders, profit, market share, allocative efficiency or the commodity form. There is commercial tuition only in parts of vocational training and international education. While intensified competition, entrepreneurship and consumer talk are pervasive in higher education, capitalism is not very important. At the most, there are regulated quasi-markets, as in post-Browne UK. This differs from the experience of privatisation and commercialisation of transport, communications, broadcasting and health insurance in many nations. The article argues that bona fide market reform in higher education is constrained by intrinsic limits specific to the sector (public goods, status competition), and political factors associated with those limits. This suggests that market reform is utopian, and the abstract ideal is sustained for exogenous policy reasons (e.g. fiscal reduction, state control, ordering of contents). But, if capitalist markets are clearly unachievable, a more authentic modernisation agenda is needed.
The paper reviews Asia-Pacific higher education and university research, focusing principally on the "Confucian" education nations Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong China, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam. ...Except for Vietnam, these systems exhibit a special developmental dynamism-still playing out everywhere except Japan-and have created a distinctive model of higher education more effective in some respects than systems in North America, the English-speaking world and Europe where the modern university was incubated. The Confucian Model rests on four interdependent elements: (1) strong nation-state shaping of structures, funding and priorities; (2) a tendency to universal tertiary participation, partly financed by growing levels of household funding of tuition, sustained by a private duty, grounded in Confucian values, to invest in education; (3) "one chance" national examinations that mediate social competition and university hierarchy and focus family commitments to education; (4) accelerated public investment in research and "world-class' universities. The Model has downsides for social equity in participation, and in the potential for state interference in executive autonomy and academic creativity. But together with economic growth amid low tax regimes, the Confucian Model enables these systems to move forward rapidly and simultaneously in relation to each and all of mass tertiary participation, university quality, and research quantity and quality. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).
The 2002 'glonacal' paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, ...national and global scales. None
have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remade and newly
invented. The glonacal paper has been widely used in higher education studies, though single-scale nation-bound methods still have a strong hold. Drawing on insights from human geography and selected empirical studies, the present paper
builds on the glonacal paper in a larger theorization of space and scale. It describes how material elements, imagination and social practices interact in making space, which is the sphere of social relations; it discusses multiplicity
in higher education space and sameness/different tensions; and it takes further the investigation of one kind of constructed space in higher education, its heterogenous scales (national, local, regional, global etc.). The paper reviews
the intersections between scales, especially between national and global, the ever-changing ordering of scales, and how agents in higher education mix and match scales. It also critiques ideas of fixed scalar primacy such as
methodological nationalism and methodological globalism - influential in studies of higher education but radically limiting of what can be imagined and practised. Ideas matter. The single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be
cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life. Author abstract
University rankings widely affect the behaviours of prospective students and their families, university executive leaders, academic faculty, governments and investors in higher education. Yet the ...social science foundations of global rankings receive little scrutiny. Rankings that simply recycle reputation without any necessary connection to real outputs are of no common value. It is necessary that rankings be soundly based in scientific terms if a virtuous relationship between performance and ranking is to be established, the worst potentials of rankings are to be constrained, and rankings are optimised as a source of comparative information. This article evaluates six ranking systems, Shanghai ARWU, Leiden University, QS, Scopus, Times Higher Education and U-Multirank, according to six social science criteria and two behavioural criteria. The social science criteria are materiality (rankings must be grounded in the observable higher education world), objectivity (opinion surveys should not be used), externality (ranked universities should not be a source of data about themselves), comprehensiveness (rankings should cover the broadest possible range of functions), particularity (ranking systems should eschew multi-indicators with weights, or proxy measures) and ordinal proportionality (vertical distinctions between universities should not be exaggerated). The behavioural criteria are the alignment of the ranking with tendencies to improved performance of all institutions and countries, and transparency, meaning accessibility to strategy making designed to maximize institutional position. The pure research rankings rate well overall but lack comprehensiveness. U-Multirank is also strong under most criteria but stymied by its 100 per cent reliance on subjective data collected via survey.
Higher education and public good Marginson, Simon
Higher education quarterly,
October 2011, Letnik:
65, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Policy debate about whether to maintain public subsidies for higher education has stimulated reconsideration of the public mission of higher education institutions, especially those that provide ...student places conferring private benefits. If the work of higher education institutions is defined simply as the aggregation of private interests, this evaporates the rationale for higher education institutions as distinctive social foundations with multiple public and private roles. The private benefits could be produced elsewhere. If that is all there is to higher education institutions, they could follow the Tudor monasteries into oblivion. But what is 'public' in higher education institutions? What could be 'public'? What should be 'public'? The paper reviews the main notions of 'public' (public goods in economics, public understood as collective good and Habermas' public sphere) noting the contested and politicised environment in which notions of 'public' must find purchase. A turn to global public goods offers the most promising strategy for re-grounding the 'public' character of higher education. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).
This paper maps the global dimension of higher education and associated research, including the differentiation of national systems and institutions, while reflecting critically on theoretical tools ...for working this terrain. Arguably the most sustained theorisation of higher education is by Bourdieu: the paper explores the relevance and limits of Bourdieu's notions of field of power, agency, positioned and position-taking; drawing on Gramsci's notion of hegemony in explaining the dominant role played by universities from the United States. Noting there is greater ontological openness in global than national educational settings, and that Bourdieu's reading of structure/agency becomes trapped on the structure side, the paper discusses Sen on self-determining identity and Appadurai on global imagining, flows and 'scapes'. The dynamics of Bourdieu's competitive field of higher education continue to play out globally, but located within a larger and more disjunctive relational setting, and a setting that is less closed, than he suggests.
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