The dream is over: The crisis of Clark Kerr's California idea of higher education

The Dream Is Over tells the extraordinary story of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by visionary University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries. The Master Plan's equality of opportunity policy brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world's leading system of public research universities. The California idea became the leading model for higher education across the world and has had great influence in the rapid growth of universities in China and East Asia. Yet, remarkably, the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. Universal access is faltering, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face new challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader, lags far behind. Can the social values embodied in Kerr's vision be renewed

Public/private in higher education: a synthesis of economic and political approaches

The public/private distinction is central to higher education but there is no consensus on ‘public’. In neo-classical economic theory, Samuelson distinguishes non-market goods (public) that cannot be produced for profit, from market-based activity (private). This provides a basis for identifying the minimum necessary public expenditure, but does not effectively encompass collective goods, or normative elements. In political theory ‘public’ is often understood as state ownership and/or control. Dewey regards social transactions as ‘public’ when they have relational consequences for persons other than those directly engaged, and so become matters of state concern. This is more inclusive than Samuelson but without limit on costs. Neither definition is wholly satisfactory, each offers something, and each can be used to critically interrogate the other. The article synthesises the two approaches, applying the resulting analytical framework with four quadrants (civil society, social democracy, state quasi-market and commercial market) to higher education and research

The public good created by higher education institutions in Russia

The public/private distinction is central to higher education but there is no consensus on the meaning of 'public'. Two different meanings are in use. Economic theory distinguishes non market goods (public) that cannot be produced for profit, from market-based activity (private). This provides a basis for identifying the minimum necessary public expenditure, but does not effectively encompass collective goods. In political theory 'public' is often understood as state ownership and/ or control. This is more inclusive than the economic definition, and recognizes the scope for norms and policies, but lacks clear boundaries. The first part of the article synthesizes these two approaches, developing an analytical framework with four quadrants (civil society, social democracy, state quasi-market, commercial market) that can be used to categorise activities in higher education and research. The second part summarises the findings of 30 semi-structured interviews in the Russian government and two universities, conducted in 2013, concerning perceptions of public goods produced in Russian higher education. While most interviewees saw research as a global public good, they were divided in relation to teaching and learning. Some understood the education function as a public good in both the economic and political sense and wanted the government to take greater responsibility for improvement in higher education. Others saw higher education as a private good in the economic sense, and while they acknowledged the need for government because of market failure, wanted public intervention and regulation to be reduced. This division in thought about public/private paralleled the larger division between Soviet and neoliberal thinking in the Russian polity, and also the divided character of higher education, which is evenly split between free government administered places and a fee-paying student market

Limitations of human capital theory

Human capital theory assumes that education determines the marginal productivity of labour and this determines earnings. Since the 1960s, it has dominated the economics, and policy and public understanding, of relations between education and work. It has become widely assumed that intellectual formation constitutes a mode of economic capital, higher education is preparation for work, and primarily education (not social background) determines graduate outcomes. However, human capital theory fails the test of realism, due to weaknesses of method: use of a single theoretical lens and closed system modelling, inappropriate application of mathematical tools, and multi-variate analysis of interdependent variables. Human capital theory imposes a single linear pathway on the complex passage between heterogeneous education and work. It cannot explain how education augments productivity, or why salaries have become more unequal, or the role of status. These limitations are discussed with reference to research on social stratification, work, earnings and education

The evolution of the student as a customer in Australian higher education: a policy perspective

In 2014, the Australian Federal Government attempted to de-regulate higher education fees so as to allow universities to set their own tuition fees. The associated public debate offer critical insights into how the identity of a student as a ‘customer’ of higher education is understood and deployed when developing higher education policy. This paper uses the 2014 Australian higher education reforms as a lens through which to further scholarly research into the student-as-customer metaphor and to see how it is influenced by the perceptions and understandings of policy actors external to the higher education sector. These include politicians, special interest groups, the students and their parents and prospective employers. This study reveals that the public/private nexus—both of funding and benefit— problematizes traditional conceptualisations of students and others as higher education customers. In turn, this restricts the ability or desire of policy actors to describe how the student functions as a customer as a consequence of market reform. This inability compromises the development of effective and sustainable higher education polic