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JAPP: Abstracts

Volume 5, Number 2, Spring 2008

Regionalisation and Higher Education
CHRIS DUKE, RMIT, Melbourne

This paper looks at universities from the perspective of other occupants of the same geographical region who might be partners in regional development. It takes a bleakly realistic view of the difficulties involved for universities to engage more productively with their regions for social and economic development. It draws out lessons from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2004-07 study, ‘Supporting the Contribution of Higher Education to Regional Development’, in 14 regions across five continents, including processes, findings and unfinished business, to consider barriers to closer involvement. Universities are portrayed as often proud and choosy companions. Regions vary significantly. Despite global interest in devolution they are often ill-defined and weak in traditional bonds, making them immature, gauche and reluctant partners for universities. Recent global competitive tendencies impact on both regions and universities, pulling the latter away from regional engagement in favour of world league table positioning. There is a danger that local involvement is seen as a second-best substitute for those who fail. The paper adopts an ecological perspective in concluding that in a competitive era of mass higher and universal tertiary education, regional systems of interdependent higher education systems collectively sharing roles and responsibilities across the spectrum of demands on higher and tertiary education, offer the best way forward.

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Bologna Plus: the State of European Higher Education
PETER SCOTT, Kingston University

The significance of the changing nature of Higher Education (HE) in Europe has been largely ignored by institutions in the UK due to variants of either Euroscepticism or a belief that somehow British HE is unique. This article argues that these attitudes are hampering future engagement between HE providers across Europe and those in the UK. It is limiting the potential for global reach which the changes to the European Higher Education Area offers HE providers. The article sets out the opportunities presented by the Bologna Process and the Lisbon declaration suggesting that the future of higher education in Europe provides many more opportunities than has been previously recognised by UK policy makers and institutional leaders.

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Neither fish nor fowl: the contradiction at the heart of Australian tertiary education
LEESA WHEELAHAN, Griffith University, Australia

This paper explores the extent to which pathways from technical and further education institutes (TAFE) to higher education in Australia are able to act as a mechanism for social justice, access and equity. Like Britain, Australia uses the market as the mechanism to distribute access to a near-universal system of higher education and, like Britain, this has not solved the problem of access to elite higher education. However, Australia has an additional obstacle to overcome in developing coherent pathways from TAFE to higher education, which is that publicly-funded TAFE qualifications in Australia must be based on competency-based training models of curriculum. TAFE is increasing its provision of short-cycle higher education qualifications, but only as full-fee provision. This article explores the tensions that arise in Australia from conflicting models of curriculum in TAFE and higher education, from the growth of private higher education provision in TAFE, and from the use of markets to mediate access to higher education. It argues that these tensions must be resolved so that pathways from TAFE to higher education can ensure socially just access to, participation in, and outcomes from higher education by students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

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Australia: twenty years of Higher Education expansion
GAVIN MOODIE, Griffith University, Australia

In 1986 an estimated 11% of Australian 18 to 24-year-olds were enrolled in higher education (Dawkins, 1987b, p 109). By 2005 just under 20% of 18 to 24-year-olds were enrolled in higher education. In 1986 Australia had a structure but not the financing to support mass higher education in Trow’s (1974) terms; 20 years later it has the financing but no longer the structure to support mass higher education. Another big and distinctive change in Australian higher education over the last two decades has been the growth of international students, from 4% of total enrolments in 1988 to 25% of enrolments in 2005. This article reports on how Australia made these changes, the strengths and weaknesses of Australia’s approach and the issues these may raise for other countries. It argues that the main motive for Australia’s expansion of higher education for both domestic and international students was to expand its contribution to the country’s economic development; equity and student access remained an incidental consideration, increasingly overlooked as the period under review progressed.

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Higher Education policy in England: missed opportunities, unintended consequences and unfinished business
WILLIAM LOCKE, Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, The Open University

Current higher education policy in England is characterised by some enduring dilemmas and challenges that the New Labour government has so far largely failed to resolve in its unprecedented three terms in office. How to pay for a mass system that is approaching 50% participation by young people, how to achieve greater equity of access to that system and how to transform higher education to meet new social and economic needs are the principal long-term challenges among others that remain unfinished business. This article examines policymaking on expansion, diversity, funding, research and teaching during this period. It argues that the policymaking process in England, and the trajectory this has taken since 1997, may be as significant as the policies themselves in limiting future options. It identifies four characteristics of the current policymaking process and their implications for the future direction of HE policy in England: increasing centralisation, the co-option of sector initiatives for government purposes, the tensions between short-term initiatives and longer-term approaches and the predominance of ideology over research as a basis for policy. Instead, it concludes, we should be developing a mode of policymaking that is iterative, research-informed, cooperative (rather than merely ‘consultative’), strategic and that produces a long-term framework for enabling change.

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