Have the changes introduced by the 2004 Higher Education Act made higher education admissions in England wider and fairer?

‘Widening participation’ and ‘fair access’ have been contested policy areas in English higher education since at least the early 1990s. They were key facets of the 2003 White Paper – The Future of Higher Education – and the subsequent 2004 Higher Education Act, with stated objectives that the reach of higher education should be wider and fairer. In particular, there has been considerable concern about admissions to ‘top universities’, which have remained socially as well as academically exclusive. The principal policy tools used by the Act were the introduction of variable tuition fees, expanded student grants, discretionary bursaries and the new Office for Fair Access (OFFA). This paper draws on publicly available statistics to assess whether the changes implemented by the 2004 Office for Fair Access (OFFA). 2004. Producing Access Agreements: OFFA guidance to institutions, Bristol: OFFA.  [Google Scholar] Act have indeed made access to English higher education wider and fairer in relation to young people progressing from state schools and colleges and from lower socio‐economic groups. It concludes that, while there is some evidence for modest improvements, these have been concentrated outside the ‘top universities’, which have seen slippage relative to the rest of the sector. The paper concludes with a discussion of the reasons why financial inducements appear to be a flawed and naive approach to influencing student demand.     

Participation and equity in higher education: are we going back to the future?

The December 2008 special issue of the Oxford Review of Education provided a review of education policy during Tony Blair’s tenure as Prime Minister. This paper forms a response to the ten contributions to that special issue and discusses some of the issues raised in them. While a few positive aspects of education under New Labour were identified in the special edition, it focused more on the failures of New Labour than its achievements. A common theme to emerge from the papers included the government’s pursuit of neo‐liberal market policies at the expense of its professed commitment to social justice. While accepting that the government’s failure to tackle the differences in educational outcomes between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils constitutes a major failing, the present author argues that significant achievements, such as early years provision, were neglected in the special issue. He also discusses the electoral considerations facing New Labour and the personal role of Tony Blair in determining policy. The paper goes on to consider whether New Labour’s education policy has changed since the departure of Blair and identifies some hints of a potentially more progressive approach developing under Brown. It concludes by suggesting that contributing towards a debate about alternatives to Blairite policies should now become a priority for the ‘educational establishment’.     

西方国家高等教育学费政策的变化及其影响--以英国、澳大利亚、爱尔兰和美国为例

20世纪90年代以来高等教育学费政策在许多国家发生了很大变化,这些变化对高等教育的发展产生了重要影响.以英国、澳大利亚、爱尔兰和美国等国为例,英国学费政策实施时间虽短但处于不断调整之中;澳大利亚毕业后付费政策在世界上独树一帜;爱尔兰反其道而行之,取消学费效果最终如何?美国引领世界高等教育潮流,学费不断上涨结果如何?是什么因素影响学费政策的变化?这些国家学费政策变化最终会产生什么影响?     

Research planning and management in non‐traditional research discipline areas

Abstract

In its drive for higher efficiency and effectiveness in higher education, the Australian Commonwealth Government released its policy on higher education, Higher Education: A Policy Statement during the late 1980s which contributed to the introduction of performance indicators to manage and assess the performance of the higher education system. The research component of annual Commonwealth funding to universities, called the Research Quantum, is now distributed by a set of performance indicators: external research income, publications count and higher degree research completions. This paper analysed the impact of these indicators on the research activities of Australian university academics based on Leibenstein's model of X‐efficiency. Although the impact of performance indicators on university academics was found to follow the pressure‐effort relationship, for some respondents, the increase in effort as a result of heightened pressure had involved strategic behaviour. Two conditions that are identified for the minimisation of an institution's X‐inefficiency despite high staff effort are a high ratio of maximising to non‐maximising decisions for both the staff and institution, and for all the institution's essential objectives/activities, and not just those which are measured by the performance indicators. The implications of these findings for the development and application of performance indicators are discussed.     

转型期俄罗斯高等教育学费制度改革

俄罗斯作为一个社会急剧转型的国家,在高等教育经费筹措改革方面取得了世人瞩目的成绩。学费制度改革便是此次俄罗斯高等教育经费筹措制度改革的重要内容,它使俄罗斯高等教育在规模上、结构上产生了颠覆性的变化,有力地推动了转型期俄罗斯高等教育的迅速发展,基本满足了人民群众通过不同途径接受高等教育的需求和转型时期社会经济发展对各类高等教育人才的需要。     

我国高等教育学费制度分析与建议

我国高等教育学费制度存在着缺乏必要的成本约束机制、无法体现不同学校或专业间的收益差异、实行＂一刀切＂的学费模式、政府投资不足、学生机会成本受到忽视等问题。鉴于此,我国高等教育学费制度应当确定合理的学费标准和定价周期,加大财政对教育的拨款,完善奖学金及助学贷款制度,国家坚持对经济落后地区的投资倾斜政策,建立高等教育成本核算与控制评价制度。     

中国高等教育财政经费来源的变迁:国家财政经费与个人学杂费关系的实证研究

本文利用统计数据对国家财政经费与个人学杂费变化状况、高等教育经费弹性系数和个人负担率进行了计算分析,在此基础上建立自回归模型对2010年的国家财政经费与个人学杂费进行了预测研究,获得的研究结论是:中国的高等教育成本分担政策已经快速实现,国家财政经费比重显著降低,个人学杂费所占比重较快地增加;人均高等教育经费在1999年之前保持增长,1999年之后呈现稳中趋降;个人及其家庭的财政贡献增长速度远远大于政府财政贡献的增长速度,也意味着个人及其家庭对高等教育的经济负担大大加重;今后一段时间内高等教育财政需求面临相当大的压力和隐忧。建议控制高等教育规模的过快扩张,关注生均教育财政指标变化状况,实现高等教育财政来源的更加多样化。     

Where is the gap between internationalisation strategic planning and its implementation? A study of 16 Dutch universities’ internationalisation plans

A dominant concern with internationalisation through the past decades has been the process of strategic transformation of universities. While strategic management has been perceived as a necessary and useful approach in the construction of internationalisation, many criticisms have been levelled against the application of strategic management in internationalisation. One of these criticisms is the ‘implementation gap’ between internationalisation strategic plans and their actual outcomes. Based on interview data collected from 73 key actors involved in internationalisation at 16 Dutch public universities, this research identifies 12 elements that comprise the concept strategic management and illustrates how educational practitioners in different sectors (research universities and universities of applied sciences) and job function levels (central and faculty) prioritise these elements. The key contribution of this research is the clarification of the areas where the ‘implementation gap’ exists and the causes of this gap. The findings of this research are particularly important in the midst of uncontested popularisation of strategic management, because they can help universities to reduce this gap and improve the effectiveness of their strategic management practices.     

An ecological fallacy in higher education policy: the use,overuse and misuse of ‘low participation neighbourhoods’

One form of ecological fallacy is found in the dictum that ‘you are where you live’ – otherwise expressed in the idea that you can infer significant information about an individual or their family from the prevailing conditions around their home. One expression of this within higher education in the UK has been the use (and, arguably, overuse and misuse) of ‘low participation neighbourhoods’ (LPNs) over the last 15 years. These are areas that have been defined, from historic official data, as having a lower-than-average propensity to send their young people on to university. These LPNs have increasingly become used within the widening participation and social mobility agendas as a proxy for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who have the potential to benefit from higher education, but who would not attend without encouragement, support and/or incentives. In this article, we explore the various uses to which LPNs have been put by policy makers, universities and practitioners, including the targeting of outreach activities, the allocation of funding and the monitoring of the social mix within higher education. We use a range of official data to demonstrate that LPNs have a questionable diagnostic value, with more disadvantaged families living outside them than within them, while they contain a higher-than-expected proportion of relatively advantaged families. We also use content analysis of university policy documents to demonstrate that universities have adopted some questionable practices with regard to LPNs, although some of these are now being actively discouraged.     

Unlocking the gates to the peasants: are policies of ‘fairness’ or ‘inclusion’ more important for equity in higher education?

Attempts to make higher education more equitable more readily succeed at the aggregate (sector) level than at the institutional, with students from disadvantaged groups being overrepresented in low-status institutions. It is suggested that this is because policies of ‘fairness’ (i.e. proportional representation) dominate the contemporary policy framework and are strongly resisted by elite universities. However, using the Australian higher education sector as an example, this paper argues that equity policy is actually a mix of ‘proportional fairness’ and ‘inclusion’ and elite institutions resist not because the policy is deficient but because it might actually work. An alternative approach to higher education equity policy is proposed; one which requires elite institutions to engage meaningfully with disadvantaged students but allows them to retain their status advantage.     

University sustainability reporting: taking stock of transparency

This paper interrogates the case for improved and broadened public sustainability reporting by universities, and explores whether and how global performance measures capture the institutional attitudes and activities pertinent to universities’ contributions to sustainability. The analysis explores all stand-alone, English language reports produced by universities world-wide since 2007. The analysis focuses primarily on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) index. The paper finds that those universities which have adopted the GRI share a distinct conceptualisation of their role in society. The GRI framework is helpful in capturing universities’ environmental impacts and benefits, but is lacking in relation to universities’ human rights and social concerns. The paper identifies value in universities adopting a globally accepted sustainability reporting framework and makes specific suggestions as to how the framework might be better adapted for universities.     

Old Players—New Rules: Higher education institutions’ response to educational demand

Performance indicators and performance‐based funding are becoming integral components of higher education (HE) policy around the globe. We explore some of the implications of this type of policy on Norwegian HE. We believe the case will be of significant interest to policy‐makers, stakeholders and academics alike, not least because our empirical analysis indicates that competition for students is relatively stable and not particularly aggressive across groups of higher education institutions (HEIs) and over time. Despite this fact, a few HEIs have improved their share of applications, while others have fallen behind in the competition for students. The paper is based on a unique data set drawn from the Norwegian Universities and Colleges Admission Service during the period 2003–2009.