Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender have assembled an essential reference for policymakers, administrators, and all those interested in the history and sociology of higher education.
Throughout the twentieth century, public universities were established across the United States at a dizzying pace, transforming the scope and purpose of American higher education. Leading the way was California, with its internationally renowned network of public colleges and universities. This book is the first comprehensive history of California's pioneering efforts to create an expansive and high-quality system of public higher education. The author traces the social, political, and economic forces that established and funded an innovative, uniquely tiered, and geographically dispersed network of public campuses in California. This influential model for higher education, "The California Idea," created an organizational structure that combined the promise of broad access to public higher education with a desire to develop institutions of high academic quality. Following the story from early statehood through to the politics and economic forces that eventually resulted in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, The California Idea and American Higher Education offers a carefully crafted history of public higher education.
This volume consists of original essays by academic leaders and scholars connected to Clark Kerr’s life and work. He was arguably America’s most significant higher education thinker and public policy analyst in the last 50 years of the 20th century and renowned globally. However, little thoughtful attention has been devoted to assessing the whole of his work. Some commentators misunderstand the man as well as his ideas. The California Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 was one of his famous undertakings, as was his part in shaping the multi-campus University of California towards global eminence. He coined the word “multiversity” to describe what he called the “uses” of the university, but began to think it had become much too “multi”. Some of his most important work was as director of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, which laid the foundation for sophisticated policy-making. The contributors honor the achievements of a remarkable man and provide portraits of him, but of equal importance are their critical discussions of the sources of his thinking, his attempts to balance access and merit in mass higher education circumstances, the policy issues that he confronted and the success of their resolution. For many of the contributors, Kerr’s work is the starting point for understanding policy issues in varying regional and national contexts. Often thought to be a social scientist eager to keep abreast of trends, Kerr was actually au fond a moralist and surprisingly old-fashioned in his personal values.
precise, appeared until the recent crisis - to many Americans from the East of America's America, as the whole of America seemed to Europeans of a century ago: extreme and strange, full of violent contrasts, contradictory, over-advanced, neo primitive and savage, a land where everything is possible, the hippies and the religious-political fundamentalism of the Orange County, Marcuse, Angela Davis and Norman Brown, Esalen, the new consciousness. Alan Watts and Carlos Castaneda, as well as Patricia Hearst and the Sym bionese Liberation Army, Richard Nixon and his men, the Satan religion, outrageous crimes such as that of the Manson "family" and incredibly scan dalous business deals. For better or worse, California appears as a sort of preview of the European society of the future: the land of the Western World with the greatest immigration and population growth, with enormous cities which in the textbooks of your childhood were hardly even mentioned, e.g. Los Angeles, or were not mentioned at all, as in the case of San Diego and San Jose, a considerable urban development which has taken place almost overnight.
The twenty-first century has the potential to be the era of universal higher education access: the post-massification century. The growth of knowledge-based service industries and an increased need for technological and social innovations require more education, training, and re-training at the post-secondary level. This edited collection addresses the crucial issues emerging from this ongoing expansion of higher education, focusing on how national systems of higher education can respond to demands for further expansion when traditional routes to higher education have been largely exhausted. Does it make a difference how secondary education systems are organised? Can we encourage under-represented groups to participate in higher education, offering them new ways of experiencing higher education without sacrificing quality? What role will new suppliers of higher education, such as private providers, and modes of delivery, such as MOOCs, play? Are there innovative ways to manage the finances of universal access, including tuition fees and student loans? Will all social groups benefit equally from expansion, and find the institution and programme that fits their needs? Expansion will require different modes of delivery, new system models, revised qualification structures, changes to the role played by government, and a revision of the public–private finance mix. While this may lead to tensions in terms of the quality, efficiency, or equality of opportunity in the higher education system, there are also new opportunities for students and higher education institutions. With experienced researchers offering insights, national strategies and policy examples from around the world, Access and Expansion Post-Massification will give researchers and policymakers the tools they need to expand higher education into the era of the knowledge society.
This book is the result of research carried out by the partners in the Adults Learning and Participating in Education (ALPINE) Project, a project that is principally concerned with increasing the amount of adult education provided by European universities. It begins by outlining the current debate about widening participation in institutions of higher education in general and identifying issues within the context of the policy that is being developed for this sector in Europe. It continues with a description of the position in each of the selected countries in Central and Western Europe. Experienced adult education practitioners from twenty European countries have each determined the nature and extent of the current provision of adult higher education in their own country. Two final chapters of analysis and conclusions complete this survey which is the most extensive of its type that has yet been carried out in Europe.