In Search of Academic Quality

Catherine Paradeise

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349563326, 9781137298287
• eBook ISBN: 9781137298294
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

This book is based on an international comparison observing a series of universities, where diversity remains huge when considering how single institutions position themselves in terms of quality standards and combine resources, as well as the alternatives they have access to given their organizational and cultural governance path dependence.

Part I

The Road to Academic Excellence

A massive revolution is under way worldwide in the field of higher education. Starting in the late 1980s, it has become more and more resonant since the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Nevertheless, it is still far from reaching full maturity for, in many countries, higher education affairs are still run according to organisational and governance principles and processes that stabilised at the turn of the 20th century.

This first part of the book describes how the social, economic, demographic and international environment in which higher education and research institutions have been operating over the last century has and still is evolving. The higher education revolution refers more often to a standardised academic quality understanding which is identical across the whole world, and this, despite the fact that at the grass roots level, local and national contexts in which universities are embedded remain very different. Such local specificities and requirements are usually forgotten or considered irrelevant when the missions, strategies and quality outcomes single higher education institutions manage and deliver are considered for reform purposes.

Chapter 1 analyses how higher education institutions have been operating since the invention of the modern university at the end of the 19th century, showing why and how new expectations, policy rationales and assessment tools have generated dramatic global challenges for the academic business, and how policy-makers at national levels handle such expectations. Chapter 2 underlines the growing importance of new tools and quality standards aimed at assessing what individual higher education institutions produce, and in particular, how they radically modify academic conditions of action in the field all over the world.

1

Addressing Evolving Societal Expectations

Since the turn of the 21st century, the contributions of higher educational institutions to social and economic development, and the way they are steered by policy-makers have been put in question and even openly challenged by evolving societal expectations.

The narrative of knowledge-based economies that developed at the turn of the Millennium emphasises higher education as a major economic lever. Academic knowledge and spending on education are considered as key investments for innovation-based competitive economies and their international influence, on the other hand public authorities must juggle with constrained budgets and the burden of rising costs, while trying to satisfy the need for better and wider higher education. Fuelling more knowledge production and diffusion for less money appears to be an intractable dilemma.

Just as higher education becomes a major concern for states and policy-makers, symmetrically, more and more families consider it to be a central issue. Parents feel preoccupied by their children’s opportunity to obtain access to tertiary degrees, enabling them to maintain or even improve their social status. Such expectations or hopes already drove initial massification of higher education systems in the mid-1960s, when the baby boom generation reached the age of applying to university in developed countries which at that time were blooming economically. In the 2000s, the hope to benefit from opportunities for upward social mobility is alive and well and has spread across the whole planet including emerging countries. However, in many parts of the world, the cost of higher education is raising questions in families whose faith in the reliability of the resulting upward social mobility has weakened, especially in morose economic environments and when short-term school-related costs balloon such as the massive inflation in US fees and tuition costs. The perceived likelihood that each additional year of schooling will lead to more interesting and better paid jobs does not fit what long-lasting scholarly research evidences that individual returns on investment in higher education are important and have not decreased (Wachtel 1975; Calmand and Hallier 2008; OECD 2013).

At the same time, new information tools provide national and world rankings of the profile of academic quality produced by individual universities. These attract the attention of stakeholders, be they students, donors, academics or steering agencies. The so-called excellence indicators impact the perceived value of higher education institutions, hence of their comparative attractiveness, and foster international mobility of a larger fringe of elite scholars and students. They also provide strong arguments when it is necessary to justify, for example the return on taxpayer-funded public investment allocated to higher education. In our commoditised world, such rankings are appropriated as rationales for remodelling the organisation and governance of higher education at the level of single universities as well as of national systems. The purpose is two-fold – to improve the efficiency of public spending on universities and to strengthen national excellence in the world arena. Since the late 1990s, on-going reforms have become part of the daily environment of academics and staff in higher education establishments.

Four major on-going trends combine to steamroll universities worldwide into adopting similar rationalisation policies. The trends are: massification, globalisation, commodification and standardisation.

1.1 Worldwide massification

Massification means a spectacular increase in the number of students enrolled in tertiary education. An initial wave of massification occurred already half a century ago.

At the turn of the 20th century, the number of students in these countries was quite low: 29,000 in France in 1900, 53,000 in Germany in 1910. Less than 4,500 students had obtained a first level university degree in 1920 in the United Kingdom. Enrolment in the USA increased more rapidly at the end of the 19th century due to population growth. Nevertheless, in 1900, the total number of enrolled students in European countries such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States was about 260,000. The proportion of the population engaged in higher education was, therefore, no greater than one or two per cent at this time. It rose only very slowly up to the pre-World War II years: around three per cent by 1936 in France, for example, while in the United Kingdom it stayed at this level until 1950.

The post-World War II wave of massification only concerned Western advanced countries. It was fostered by economic prosperity and growth, accompanied by a rising demand for wage earners with better qualifications. As a result, the proportion in the overall active population of wage earners with higher educational qualifications increased sharply after the post-World War II baby boom. In France, for instance, the number of students went from only 137,000 in 1950 to about one million in 1985 and reached nearly 2.3 million in 2001. In Germany, the student population rose to 830,000 in 1975, 1.8 million in 2000 and 2.5 million in 2010 (Destatis 2014). In the United Kingdom, the number of enrolled students grew to about 450,000 in 1965 and two million in 2010 (Rosen 2003; HESA 2014). In the United States, the increase was also substantial, lasting from about 2.5 million students in 1950 to 13.5 million in 1990, 15.9 million in 2001 and 21 million in 2011.

Table 1.1 shows that while the total number of students engaging in higher education had grown in the West between the first wave of massification in the 1970s and 2010, the proportion of the population in the latter years who had followed tertiary education of any level or type had risen at varying paces in different countries. At the same time, access to university also increased in other regions of the world, the overall champion in terms of the percentage rise in the number of citizens accessing higher education being South Korea.

The magnitude of this new massification is significantly greater than what occurred in the 1970s. Higher education is becoming a mass product worldwide. Table 1.1 illustrates the sudden and dramatic rise in student populations at the start of the 21st century and the changing balance worldwide. The two leading countries in terms of overall population are spectacular: the People’s Republic of China and India.

Table 1.1 Percentage of generational cohorts who had access to higher education (2010)

	Age 55–64	Age 25–34
USA	40%	40%
France	20%	42%
United Kingdom	30%	45%
Germany	25%	28%
OECD countries: total	22%	40%
China (PRC)	2%	6%
South Korea	12%	65%

Source: Compiled by the authors from OECD (2014).

In 1967, China had only 674,400 students among 700 million inhabitants – a little less than 0.1 per cent. The Cultural Revolution devastated Chinese higher education and the number of students dropped to 47,800 out of about one billion inhabitants – 0.0045 per cent in 1976, while it was booming in Western advanced countries. However, by 2000, the number of students engaged in higher education in China had not only recovered but risen dramatically to 11 million. In 2005, the Chinese student population reached 15 million and peaked in 2008. However, with an enrolment rate of about 15 per cent of the college-aged population, China remains far behind advanced Western countries.

In India, before independence in 1947, access to higher education was very restricted and elitist. The enrolment rate was less than one million students out of 630 million inhabitants. Today, the Indian higher education system ranks the third largest in the world, behind only the United States and China (World Bank 2006). Since Independence, its enrolment rate has grown from 0.7 per cent in 1950–1, to 1.4 per cent in 1960–1, reaching between eight and 15 per cent depending upon the indicator used in the 2000s. In 2006–7, students in tertiary education were estimated to number 13.93 million out of the total Indian population of nearly 1.1 billion. Worldwide, the total number of students attending higher education institutions has increased by 53 per cent between 2000 and 2012, from about 97 to 153 million (UNESCO 2012). It is expected to continue to rise to 262 million by 2025.

Although this second wave of massification has reached emerging countries and more continents are experiencing a rise in student enrolments, rates of access to higher education, nevertheless, vary from one world region and country to another, from a high 71 per cent in North America and Western Europe to a low 5.6 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa. Such proportions illustrate two things: the fact that large differences remain between long-established advanced countries and the rest of the world, and the very uneven economic development occurring in the various regions of the world. However, the figures are changing at a tremendous pace. Asia is now clearly distancing the West in terms of the number of students it is training. In 2013, the old OECD and G20 lions – Germany, Australia, Canada, the USA, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Turkey – trained only 71 million students compared to the 78 million who enrolled in higher education institutions in the emerging economies of the G20 – the People’s Republic of China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea and Russia. Since 2011, the size of the second group has exceeded that of the first. As a result, the distribution of the world student population has changed dramatically over the last decade. Today, 29 per cent of the planet’s students are Chinese, 12 per cent Indian, 11 per cent American, four per cent Japanese, three per cent Brazilian, two per cent French and two per cent German with the rest of the world accounting for the remaining 37 per cent.

Student massification also leads to increases in the academic supply side. The number of higher education institutions has by and large followed the rise in student populations. Today, there are more than five times as many universities in advanced countries than there were in the 1950s.

In the USA, prior to the 1862 Morrill Act which stimulated the development and creation of new public colleges and universities with federal land grants, there were about 400 colleges, most of them private. By 1980, there were 3,231 public and private higher education institutions capable of granting degrees. By 2010, this number had reached 4,599 (NCES 2014). France had about 20 universities at the end of the 19th century. This situation did not change significantly until new creations occurred during the 1970s and 1980s: 63 new universities were opened between 1960 and 1991, bringing the total number to a peak of 86 in the 2000s. Together with the universities, smaller institutions called Grandes Ecoles bring the total number of higher education establishments in France to around 350. Germany has a total of 415 institutions of higher education – 106 are universities, 207 are universities specialised in applied sciences and the rest are a range of smaller colleges of public administration, education, theology and art (Federal Ministry of Education and Research 2004). Altogether, the British Higher Education Statistics Agency mentions 161 institutions in 2013, among which about 30 were created before 1900, 10 between 1901 and 1950, about 30 between the 1960’s and before 1992, and the rest result essentially from the incorporation of former Polytechnics after 1992 (HESA 2014).

Despite all this, the most remarkable expansion in higher education institutions, over the last two decades, has taken place outside the Western world. If we only consider China, which has experienced the sharpest rise, the number of institutions of higher learning grew to 1,500 in 2000 and 4,000 in 2005. Out of the 14,500 higher education institutions active around the world in 2013 (an approximation from our own computation of the International Association of Universities data), 4,500 are located in the USA. However, another third is based in the People’s Republic of China, while only one quarter – 3,300 – is situated in the European Union (European Union 2013). The remainder is scattered all over the world.

Massification in higher education is clearly the name of the game today at the world level with a spectacular increase in the production capacities of emergent countries. At the micro-level of individual students, tertiary education has become a worldwide promise and a key to unlock upward social mobility, while at the macro-level of states, it is considered to be a necessity for sustaining economic growth.

1.2 Commodification of higher education

The wave of massification in the 21st century described above goes hand in hand with increasing worldwide student mobility (OECD 2013) and a process of commodification of higher education, its worth being often reduced to a source of economic value for universities, countries and students.

Between 2000 and 2011, the number of internationally mobile students more than doubled (OECD 2012). In 2007, 2.8 million students studied abroad. In 2013, this number reached 4.5 million and is expected to grow to eight million by 2020. If we observe OECD and G20 countries’ market share of international students in 2011, several points come to light. First, the USA has the largest share with 17 per cent. It is followed by a group of five other advanced countries: the United Kingdom with 11 per cent, Germany with eight per cent, France with five per cent and Australia and Canada with four per cent each. Second, while the United Kingdom and Australia have increased their shares between 2000 and 2010, other countries have become comparatively less attractive. The USA and Germany are both losing ground as their market share of international students dwindles by about a third. Yet, the most prestigious higher education institutions located in advanced countries still enrol the largest number of foreign students and the USA still ranks as the leading destination. In 2014, 886.000 foreign students were registered in US universities, 22 per cent coming from Asia. But at the same time, reflecting a trend to intra-regional mobility, new study destinations are developing rapidly as higher education systems are upgrading, for instance in Australia, China, South Korea and even New Zealand. For the time being, one out of six mobile students is Chinese and Asians represent 53 per cent of all international mobility.

It is no surprise that education, economic development, democracy and social welfare are strongly intertwined. During the 19th century, the Western world extensively developed formal education from primary schools to universities as a key vehicle for the integration of states as they became democratised and industrialised. In this perspective, higher education insisted on its manifold contributions to society. Extending the frontiers of the human mind has long been considered as a way to deepen people’s humanity by enhancing individual fulfilment and social commitment that would favour pacific deliberation in society and rational political integration. At the same time, education was to extend and enhance scientific, technical and professional abilities. The generalised access to literacy (Goody 1986) conditioned the ability to run public and private affairs in larger and more complex organisations such as public administrations and big companies. It helped to invent, improve, build and operate technical (Cohen and Pestre 1998) and managerial tools (Bouffartigue 2001; Gardey 2008) that would enable a division of labour between specialised engineering and management know-how. It helped develop professions dedicated to improving health or justice in society. Backing the very idea of Progress, the elucidation of the rules of nature by scientists – for their own use in furthering science, but also appropriated by engineers to improve technologies and by technicians to apply them – would contribute to increase the production of goods, and therefore generate better welfare.

Growing commodification in society is part and parcel of the current focus on the economic benefits provided by education. Economists theorise about specific needs in education at various stages of development and the economic return on catering for them. They have demonstrated that, when based on technical imitation, economic progress is most notably influenced by secondary education. When, as is the case today in a growing number of countries, the breakthrough category of research becomes the principle source of innovation, this requires more and more cutting-edge research investments and thus, the development of research-based education provided by universities (Aghion and Cohen 2004). With the rapid emergence of economies reliant on i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• Part I The Road to Academic Excellence
• Part II Making Sense of Diversities
• Part III The Illusion of a One Best Way
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index