Educational expansion or credential inflation? The evolution of part‐time study by adults at McGill University,Canada

Part‐time students have accounted for a significant proportion of rising participation in higher education in many countries. The objectives of this paper are to enrich the empirical literature concerning the inclusion of part‐time adult learners in higher education, and to assess the two competing theoretical frameworks that have emerged to explain the international expansion of higher education in recent decades: human capital theory and social exclusion theory. Human capital theorists argue that increasingly complex demands of economies and workplaces have caused the expansion of educational provision. Theorists of social exclusion argue that increasingly intense competition among labour market participants has caused the inflation of educational credentials. This paper uses original, archival research to narrate the history of part‐time, degree‐credit study at McGill University in Canada. It finds that McGill provided a wide range of part‐time study opportunities in the 1920s and early 1930s, resisted the provision of such opportunities from the 1940s through the 1960s, and reinstated extensive part‐time study opportunities for adults in the 1970s. While both educational expansion and credential inflation took place at McGill neither human capital theory nor social exclusion theory can fully account for the rise, fall, and re‐birth of part‐time study for adults. To understand this evolution, more proximate causes, such as institutional politics and government funding models, must be explored. This paper raises important questions for future research, including those relating to gender and equity in the participation of part‐time students in higher education.     

Hard Lessons for Lifelong Learners? Age and Experience in the Graduate Labour Market

The expansion of the higher education system and widening access to undergraduate study has led to growing diversity within the graduate labour supply, including increasing numbers who studied for their degrees as mature students. Analysis of graduates entering the labour market prior to the major expansion in the early 1990s indicated that those over the age of 30 had considerably more difficulty than younger graduates in accessing the career opportunities for which their education had equipped them. Is this still the case for more recent graduates? Drawing on a major qualitative and quantitative study of a class of graduates who completed their undergraduate degree courses in 1995, this paper explores early career development and employment outcomes according to age at graduation. Although we find considerable diversity among all age groups, mature graduates were more likely than their younger peers to experience difficulty in accessing appropriate employment, had a lower rate of earnings growth and expressed higher levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs.     

国外高职教育的启示

我国高职教育已呈现出前所未有的发展势头,但要在经济全球化的背景下长期生存与发展,还需要向世界发达国家的职业教育进行学习借鉴。所以,研究国外高职教育的成果,吸取他们的办学经验,对于推进我国高职教育的改革与建设有着较为重要的意义。     

EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE ELDERLY IN INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES

There has been an increasing interest in providing educational opportunities for the elderly in most industrialized countries over the past decade. This is a reflection in part of more older people actively seeking out learning opportunities, a recognition on the part of educators of the continued ability to learn well into old age and a desire to democratize higher education, and the goal of policy makers to promote active retirement in the hope of warding off pathological processes that can accompany aging. Although accurate statistics remain elusive, there has been widespread expansion in both formal and nonformal adult education opportunities for older learners in other industrialized countries. Striking examples include the success of study circles in Sweden and universities of the third age in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Evidence collected to date suggests that they are not only tremendously popular with older students but also have salutary effects on individuals’ health and well‐being and enhance their ability to contribute to their communities. Nevertheless, all these educational opportunities still reach only a minority of the elderly; efforts in the future must be directed to expanding nonformal learning opportunities if larger numbers of old people are to be reached.     

国外高校毕业生就业政策综述

自1999年高校扩招以来,我国高等教育成功从精英教育向大众教育转变,越来越多的青年人获得了接受高等教育的机会。但随之而来的就是越来越多的大学生面临着一毕业就失业的危险,不管是研究就业的学者还是政府都在积极制定促进大学生就业的政策,本文对国外就业政策作一综述,以期对我国就业促进政策有所帮助。     

新加坡高等教育大众化评析

:8 0年代中期以前 ,新加坡政府一直推行英才教育政策。但是 ,80年代中后期以来 ,新加坡政府的教育观念和政策发生了很大的变化 ,其中最突出的就是扩大高等学校的招生规模 ,以便让更多的人能接受教育。这一观念和政策的转变使新加坡高等教育步入了一个快速发展的时期。本文对导致这一变化的社会经济背景 ,发展变化过程中的主要改革措施及存在的问题进行了分析和介绍     

发展中国家高等教育的公平效应:入学机会、选择权与就读持续性

几乎所有国家的高等教育都面临着困境,发展中国家尤甚。随着发展中国家中学毕业人数的日益增加,国民经济水平的进一步提高,民众对高等教育的需求也大幅增长。因此,高等教育规模扩张对其公平性提出了更高的要求,具体表现为增加学生的入学机会、为学生提供更多的选择权,同时鼓励学生连续就读以完成学位,实现高等教育的真正公平。     

Foregrounding Women in the Doctoral Classroom: Mainstreaming and Single-Sex Approaches to Graduate Education

An increasing number of published studies have drawn attention to gender disparities in various dimensions of Christian higher education. Although the majority of students on the campuses of member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) are women, and the percentage of women holding faculty and administrative roles has increased, the male-normed environment of the academy continues to be evident in various ways, particularly in these Christian institutions. At the same time, higher education—and doctoral education in particular—is an important pathway to prepare future leaders and professors for Christian organizations. One potential way to begin to shift toward a more welcoming climate that benefits both men and women on CCCU campuses is to “foreground,” or make central, women's issues and concerns as part of regular classroom teaching. Such foregrounding can help counter the historic tendency to treat men's experience and concerns as normative for the human race. In the discipline of missiology, women make up the bulk of the practitioners yet are underrepresented as scholars, making it a pertinent field to challenge the neglect of women's voices and concerns in the academy. This article describes how a missiology classroom has been used to create a climate where women have opportunities to be central and where women's perspectives are treated as equally important as men's perspectives. To do this, I used three key practices: intentionally addressing gendered topics in mixed classes, offering selected single-sex education opportunities for women, and focusing on gender-related topics for research and publication. Using the discipline of missiology as a case study in relation to the importance of giving women's contributions to the field both recognition and voice may also offer transferable insights for doctoral faculty in other disciplines.     

农民工培训:职业教育面临的机遇与对策

当前,随着我国城市化进程的加快,大批农民转移到城市中,农民工的培训势在必行。农民工的培训为职业教育摆脱困境带来了机遇,职业教育应抓住这一机遇,在国家宏观政策的扶持与引导下,采取相关对策,实现自身的良性发展。     

Privatisation,Domestic Marketisation and International Commercialisation of Higher Education: vulnerabilities and opportunities for Chile and Romania within the framework of WTO/GATS

This chapter explores the processes of privatisation of higher education in Chile (after 1981) and Romania (after 1989), focusing on the emergence of private institutions, the expansion in enrolments in these institutions, and the relative increase in private sources of funding for the post‐secondary sub‐sector. Attention is also given to related trends in higher education in these two countries: domestic marketisation (a strengthening of an orientation toward selling programmes/commodities to students/consumers within the country) and international commercialisation (an expansion of initiatives by domestic and foreign institutions to provide distance education, study abroad/exchange, and foreign site‐based degree programmes). Of importance to an understanding of globalisation, these two societies, which at the time exhibited similar economic systems but had different political systems and were situated in different regional contexts, experienced remarkably similar processes of and outcomes from privatisation, marketisation, and commercialisation. In both cases these processes were promoted by ‘internal’ political actors but also shaped by ‘external’ forces, notably the World Bank's higher education policy recommendations and the conditionalities included in the stabilisation and structural adjustment programmes ‘negotiated’, respectively, with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in order to obtain loans. As a result of these processes—occurring prior to and during the emergence of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) as a component of the World Trade Organization (WTO)—higher education institutions in both Chile and Romania are much more vulnerable to foreign influence/domination, although they also have somewhat greater opportunities to broaden their role in the global ‘business’ of higher education.     

文化资本对高等教育入学机会影响研究——基于文化资本再生产的视角

我国当前正在经历社会结构的重组和高等教育大众化两个特殊的历史时期。基于布尔迪厄的文化资本理论的视角,从各阶层文化资本占有的不同对高等教育的入学机会、专业选择、教育期望影响程度的不同可以看出,家庭文化资本的占有多少对高等教育入学机会产生了显著性的影响,如何通过有效的措施建立相对公平的平台、促进社会阶层的更好流动是需要重视的问题。教育不仅是实现社会分层的“筛选器”,同时也是实现社会中下层向上流动的重要途径。通过高等教育大众化更好地完善社会结构和促进社会阶层的流动,为社会的各个层次和各种职业输送不同规格和类型的人才,是高等教育大众化的重要功能之一。高等教育要实现这一功能,则必须要建立在社会各阶层享有公平的高等教育教育机会上。     

Expansion,differentiation, and the persistence of social class inequalities in British higher education

Conventional political wisdom has it that educational expansion helps to reduce socioeconomic inequalities of access to education by increasing equality of educational opportunity. The counterarguments of Maximally Maintained Inequality (MMI) and Effectively Maintained Inequality (EMI), in contrast, contend that educational inequalities tend to persist despite expansion because those from more advantaged social class backgrounds are better placed to take up the new educational opportunities that expansion affords (MMI) and to secure for themselves qualitatively better kinds of education at any given level (EMI). This paper sets out to test the predictions of the MMI and EMI hypotheses against empirical data for the case of Britain where higher education expanded dramatically during the 1960s and again during the early 1990s. The results show that quantitative inequalities between social classes in the odds of higher education enrolment proved remarkably persistent for much of the period between 1960 and 1995, and began to decline only during the early 1990s, after the enrolment rate for the most advantaged social class had reached saturation point. Throughout this same 35 year period, qualitative inequalities between social classes in the odds of enrolment on more traditional and higher status degree programmes and at ‘Old’ universities remained fundamentally unchanged. In short, social class inequalities in British higher education have been both maximally and effectively maintained.     

新加坡私立高等教育的特征与启示

新加坡私立高等教育与中国民办高等教育同起步于20世纪80年代,同样在经历了盲目扩张、缺乏规范的发展阶段后走向规范化、高质化。新加坡私立高等教育的认证化管理、国际化办学、职业化与应用化的核心课程理念以及其营利性的本质属性促成了其良性发展,其政府对人才培养的重视及高效的政府管理水平保障了新加坡私立高等教育的特色发展,国家经济发展的需求为其提供了不竭的动力,全球教育产业的兴起也是其发展的契机。新加坡私立高等教育发展对中国民办高等教育的启示有:基于组织混合性的私立高等教育管理方式;卓有成效的国际化深层建构;以教育信托认证制度为核心的质量保障体系;动态应用型课程的开发。     

Student Development Among Community College Participants in Study Abroad Programs

For decades, institutions of higher education have provided study abroad opportunities for college students wishing to increase and expand their intellectual and social skills. While many universities around the country have supported successful international exchange and study abroad programs, there is little research on community college study abroad programs and their impact on student development. Therefore, this article examines specific vectors that impact student development before and after study abroad participation in nine community colleges using Chickering's Theory of Student Development and SAS statistical methods.     

大规模扩招背景下高职院校应对策略刍议

2019年的高职大规模扩招是中国职业教育的一个历史性大事件,具有服务国家全局发展的重大战略意义,是实现“稳就业”和全面提升劳动力水平的一项重要举措。高职扩招所带来的机遇与挑战必然会引发高职教育大变革,促进高职教育类型特点进一步彰显,倒逼高职院校正视自年办学定位,在人才培养模式、产业研究、“三教”改革以及“互联网+教育”等方面尽快出台改革措施,以应对新时代高职教育高质量发展的要求。     

新世纪我国高等职业技术教育初探

对新世纪我国大力发展高等职业技术教育的必然性，必要性和高等职业技术教育的发展方向以及实施保障等进行了初探探讨，意在能够引起全社会对发展高职教育的重视。     

论高等职业教育的政治价值

现代高等教育体系的层次、种类结构日益复杂,高等职业教育在近半个世纪以来得到了很快的发展,各个国家争相制定促进高等职业教育发展的政策,既增加了广大劳动人民子女接受高等教育的机会,满足了社会对教育公平的追求,又提升了本国人力资源的知识和技能水平,提高了各产业领域的核心竞争力。高等职业教育的大发展,确实降低了社会成员的收入差距,增强了社会的和谐,保证了社会的稳定。     

Divorce, gender role, and higher education expansion

In Western societies the past two decades have witnessed a great increase of women's participation in higher education and a multiplication of responsibilities as a result of the expanded role of women. This article examines higher education enrollment between 1970 and 1987 in the United Kingdom and the United States. It is guided by a theoretical model contending that educational expansion occurs where people choose education as an adaptation to increased deprivation and uncertainty. By linking the expanded role of women to the expansion of women's participation in higher education, and by using the rising rate of divorce as an indicator of the increased disenfranchisement among women in patriarchal societies, this study attempts to uncover the hidden forces behind the recent expansion of women's participation in higher education. Multiple regression is used for the statistical analysis. The results show that the divorce rate is positively related to women's enrollment in higher education in the United States. The results also show divergent enrollment patterns between the two sexes regarding the effect of unemployment in both the United States and the United Kingdom. It is argued that gender role expectation is crucial to understanding the different effects of divorce and unemployment on the divergent enrollment patterns of men and women. The article also explores important differences in the areas of educational opportunities, the magnitude of the impact of divorce, government policies regarding women's welfare, and the differing role of credentials in social mobility in the two countries under study.