Structural Uniformity and Functional Diversification: Swedish Higher Education Ten Years after the Higher Education Reform

The Swedish higher education reform in 1977 was designed to create an integrated and unified system, by including all post-secondary education in a new structure. The governance and organizational pattern were designed to support flexibility, creativity and capacity for innovation. The inner life of higher education today reflects these intentions of the reform but is also characterized by market-orientation and market-dependency. These new and strange issues in the higher education context are influencing the everyday life of an educational system, in which notions of centralism, uniformity and state legitimation are still taken for granted.