The Palgrave International Handbook of Higher Education Policy and Governance

Jeroen Huisman, Harry de Boer, David D. Dill, Manuel Souto-Otero, Jeroen Huisman, Harry de Boer, David D. Dill, Manuel Souto-Otero

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137456175
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Administración de la educación

This state-of-the-art reference collection addresses the major themes, theories and key concepts related to higher education policy and governance on an international scale in one accessible volume.
Mapping the field and showcasing current research and theorizations from diverse perspectives and authoritative scholars, this essential guide will assist readers in navigating the myriad concepts and themes involved in higher education policy and governance research and practice. Split into two sections, the first explores a range of policy concepts, theories and methods including governance models, policy instruments, institutionalism and organizational change, new public management and multi-level governance. The second section addresses salient themes suchas institutional governance, funding, quality, employability, accountability, university rankings, widening participation, gender, inequalities, technology, student involvement and the role of higher education in society.
Global in its perspective and definitive in content, this one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for a wide range of academics, students and researchers in the fields of education, education policy, sociology, social and public policy, political science and for leadership.

Part I

Concepts, Theories and Methods

1

Higher Education: The Nature of the Beast

James S. Fairweather and Emiko Blalock

In this chapter, from a macro perspective, we lay out the historical bases for institutions and systems of higher education, discuss the policy challenges facing higher education today and lay the groundwork for subsequent chapters that examine the organizational, administrative and policy responses to these challenges by institutions and systems of higher education. We pay particular attention to three interdependent and universal policy themes – access, quality and cost – and the triumph in higher education of the pursuit of prestige.

From their beginning, institutions of higher education, of all types and locations, have tried to balance external responsiveness to meet societal needs with internally driven collegial systems guided by norms such as academic freedom, where decisions about student accomplishments, curricula and hiring new faculty members are within the purview of the professoriate (Birnbaum, 1988; Geiger, 2015). This balancing act holds true more or less irrespective of the characterization of national higher education systems: from ministry-led to market-driven, from elite to mass higher education, from having a colonial history to being a colonial power, from systems with selective admissions and prestigious faculties to systems with open access (Ashby, 1974; Clark, 1972; Kerr, 1982; Maassen, 2012). Even institutions and systems deemed the most removed from societal pressures – the ‘ivory towers’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) or, in Slaughter and Leslie’s (2004) terms, the institutions least influenced by academic capitalism – often fulfil important societal requirements such as preparing the next generation of leaders in various occupations and generating important research. The modern interconnected global economy with its concomitant emphasis on human capital through more and better education has made this balancing act more complex and fragile (Duderstadt, 2007).

The internal structures of universities reflect both the external/internal dynamics and the distinct operating functions of academic institutions. Similar to any government agency or business, higher education institutions rely on bureaucratic structures to manage functions such as finance and facilities. In contrast, the academic side of these institutions is better characterized as a loosely coupled system (Orton and Weick, 1990) where distinct professional units – departments, schools, colleges – operate collegially but independently within an overall shared institutional context typically designed to govern decisions made about students (admissions, academic progress, degree-granting) and the faculty (hiring, promotion, tenure) (Birnbaum, 1988). Even in top-down, ministry-based systems, most of the decisions about academic work are left to the judgement of individual professors and academic departments rather than to a system-wide edict (Maassen and Olsen, 2007). Academic units also reflect a balance between internal institutional norms and those of the discipline. Most of the recent efforts in the United States to improve undergraduate teaching in the sciences, engineering and mathematics run into conflicting messages from the institution and the discipline both about the nature of good teaching and about the importance of teaching in decisions about faculty performance (Fairweather, 2008; PCAST, 2012; Singer, 2012). Here the dynamic is best captured by faculty identities: Is the faculty member primarily, for example, a physicist whose primary responsibility is to the discipline or is he/she first and foremost a member of a particular university whose primary responsibilities are local (Fairweather and Paulson, 2008; Powell and DiMaggio, 1999)? This dynamic plays out between the value of research and scholarship, which has a national or even global reach, and teaching and public service where the focus is on the local institution and perhaps its geographic region (Fairweather, 1996).

What has changed in the past decade or two is the emergence of a dominant vision, or at least shared desired goals, for higher education policy across nations and continents. Despite the deep differences about the perceived relative importance of the public and private benefits of higher education (e.g. Bowen, 1977), most nations and even individual institutions increasingly view higher education as crucial to providing the human capital to allow (or continue to allow) countries to compete in the global economy (Fairweather, 2006; Jongbloed, 2010). The emphasis here focuses on both quality and access. The race is on to educate as many people as possible and to do so competently. Most countries, even those with a history of elite higher education such as the United Kingdom, now provide (or aspire to provide) mass higher education.

One consequence of the simultaneous pursuit of access and quality is the considerable diversification both across and within academic institutions to meet these distinct goals (Huisman, Meek and Wood, 2007). Within institutions, on the academic side of the house, diversification is based on academic discipline. Academic departments (and related structural forms such as centres and institutes) provide a means to respond both to institutional goals and to those of the discipline (Clark, 1972). Diversification between institutions is typically based on mission. The Netherlands and Finland, for example, have distinct systems for universities and polytechnics. The US state California has a three-part system with research universities (University of California), teaching-oriented colleges (California State University) and community colleges. In practice, the line between the first two is blurred because the demand for graduate-level education exceeds the ability of the University of California to provide enough of it. In the United States, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching developed the most widely used classification scheme for academic institutions. Based on mission, it ranges from doctoral/research-intensive universities to teaching-oriented institutions (master’s and bachelor’s institutions), community colleges and specialized institutions (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2010).

In addition, today we have an emerging consensus about the ‘best’ form of higher education – the highest quality – and it is based on the prestige of the faculty members primarily through their research and scholarship (and sometimes the selectivity of students) (Altbach and Balan, 2007). Although this vision is not uniformly held – selective liberal arts colleges in the United States are quite prestigious despite focusing mainly on teaching (Clark, 1992) and Brazilian higher education places very high value on professional preparation and certification (Schwartzman, 2007) – it is prevalent. The various international and national rankings of institutional (and sometimes programmes) quality reflect the dominance of this view of quality as well as the triumph of prestige as the coin of the higher education realm (e.g. Times Higher Education, 2014). This comparison also indicates the increasing importance of internationalization in higher education (Stensaker et al., 2008) and the global basis on which institutions are compared. Although the pursuit of prestige in higher education is not new (Fairweather, 1996), the widespread emphasis on prestige across national systems today is quite pronounced. Even though most countries have found ways to provide non-elite higher education – polytechnics, community colleges and other teaching-oriented institutions – the national goal is often to raise the prestige and visibility of higher education as a whole.

The pursuit of greater access and quality has challenged most countries and institutions to find ways to fund higher education. The debate about whether or not tuition is a legitimate cost category – challenged in the Nordic countries and accepted in the United States, among others (Jongbloed, 2010) – cannot disguise the fundamental challenge of finding ways to fund such a labour-intensive activity where the cost of adapting to a rapidly changing world of ideas and technology is going up (Fairweather, 2006). Indeed, in the United States the cost of attending a four-year public university is the fastest growing cost category in the national inflation index (College Board, 2014).

Another consequence of the pursuit of access and quality is the growth of quality assurance, accreditation and other mechanisms to attempt to preserve (or attain) quality in mass higher education systems (Westerheijden, 2010). Accreditation is meant to ensure that an institution (and, in some cases, an academic programme) meets the minimum fiscal and academic standards to offer degrees. Philosophically, quality assurance differs from accreditation in its focus on distinguishing levels of quality between institutions and academic programmes. In practice, the large-scale application of quality assurance requires reliance in part on the same rather generic measures used in accreditation (Westerheijden, 2010).

Cost control and the pursuit of prestige combine in interesting ways. In Finland, for example, the University Act of 2009 decentralized the ministry-based system to legally autonomous institutions. The goals of this act were (1) to increase the quality (and prestige) of academic institutions by increasing their ability to adapt to change more quickly and (2) to reduce the percentage of operating costs paid directly by the national government (Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, 2014).

As a ‘case study’ of these various policy influences and the response by academic institutions, consider the Bologna Process and Lisbon Strategy in Europe. In the 1998 and 1999 Bologna declarations, the European Ministers of Education indicated their intention to create greater access to and mobility within higher education based upon international cooperation and academic exchange (i.e. increase access). The subsequent Lisbon Strategy in 2000, initiated by the European Union (EU), officially declared the crucial role of higher education through research and graduate education in the economic future of Europe. To promote student mobility, key components of the Bologna Process were a common credit system for student work and a common structure for bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Many European universities increased their course offerings in English to encourage greater student mobility. There is little doubt that the Bologna Process has increased student mobility across national boundaries (Amaral et al., 2010).

Among the motivations for the Bologna Process and especially the Lisbon Strategy was increased effectiveness of European higher education in preparing graduates for the global economy and enhanced prestige of European universities internationally (Jongbloed, 2010). The continued lacklustre economic recovery in Europe in recent years makes it difficult at this point to assess changes in the effectiveness of higher education in this regard. In addition to the structural adaptations by many European universities and the designation by many national systems to link higher education to economic development more directly, a (perhaps) unanticipated consequence was an increased reliance on the EU as a source for research funds to help offset the increased costs in the pursuit of greater quality and access envisioned in the Bologna Process (Jongbloed, 2010). Most important for our discussion, as is true for most top-down policy reform efforts in higher education, it is easier to trace the structural changes in academic institutions and systems in response to the Bologna Process and Lisbon Strategy than it is to identify changes in the cultures inside academic institutions, that is, instructional approaches, student–faculty relationships and leadership (Kezar, 2014). Ultimately, these cultural reforms hold the keys to long-term improvements in student learning outcomes, quality and links with economic development (Birnbaum, 1988).

The uniqueness of higher education

The nature and evolution of higher education systems and individual institutions are unique in relation to other policy and government agencies. Institutions of higher education are peculiar, each to one another and to other public policy agencies. Whether governed by ministries, state and local government or independently (privately), their perceived and actual market-responsiveness, or their participation in processes like Bologna, institutions of higher education make adjustments or reforms to many of these environmental influences.

The peculiarity of higher education to other public policy agencies is probably most evident in terms of the ‘purpose’ of higher education. Higher education, regardless of governance, typically has multiple objectives: the production of knowledge (education), the attentiveness to community (service) and the advancement of research (Duderstadt, 2007; Kerr, 1982). Maassen and Stensaker (2011) characterized the main functions of the university as ‘the diffusion and formation of a dominant belief system, selection of elites, generation of new knowledge, and the training of the bureaucracy’ (p. 758).

Most agree that the mission of higher education is multifaceted. One could also argue that all institutions of higher education (as well as the systems in which they operate) share the same challenges: providing quality instruction and (for many) quality research, maintaining or increasing access and managing budgets while controlling cost and price. Hence, how do governing systems and policy influence the behaviour of higher education towards its pursuit of increased prestige; of the production of knowledge; and of training a new workforce for service or bureaucracy? Further, does the system by which an institution of higher education is governed create clearer directives? What kinds of allowances do institutes of higher education have depending on their system of national or state government or educational governance? These questions, crucial to understanding the function of academic institutions, are examined in later chapters of this book.

Here we focus on the broader question of how institutions of higher education differ from other government agencies in how they operate and in their relationships to national and state governments. Almost all academic institutions face the threefold challenge of quality, access and cost, and their response to these challenges may look the same or different regardless of their governing structure. Nearly all academic institutions provide instruction. Many also conduct research. Some provide public service and technology transfer. And many – even those primarily focused on teaching – aspire to achieve greater prestige by adding doctoral programmes and seeking designation as a ‘university’ (Trow, 1984). The pursuit of quality and access and even prestige is partly imbedded in government and institutional policies, but these pursuits cannot be achieved solely by edict. They rely on cultural norms deeply imbedded in the academic disciplines and in the graduate training of future faculty members (Wulff and Austin, 2004). For example, in an effort to enhance prestige a US university may invest heavily in the academic disciplines it believes will increase the stature of the institution. Similarly, an increased focus on prestige in European nations may shift the attention of academic quality to a rankings race (Maassen and Stensaker, 2011). Whether either effort results in enhanced prestige is a different matter. It depends on what the faculty members accomplish and how it is perceived by their peers elsewhere (Fairweather, 2002, 2005).

Edicts are not limited to governments and system offices. An academic institution can seek to improve the quality of undergraduate teaching by promoting policies to rewa...