The Rise of the University’s Third Mission

The last decades have seen a fundamental upheaval in the organisation of modern life, and the university as an institution has been as widely affected by these changes as business, governments, and civil society groups. Higher education has been confronted with increasing marketisation of the State and aggressive re-regulation of the public sector. Internationalisation has created new potential markets for students, alongside increasing access to research collaborators, but it opened universities up to competition with and comparison against institutions in other countries. The growing importance of knowledge production and innovation for economic life has created new potential roles for universities and challenged the traditional societal privileges and monopolies which they have long enjoyed. But these changes have come at the same time as an evolution in the process of change: a growing role for the State in creating and regulating markets in public services has come with a greater role for the State in guiding this reform process

Dutch policies on socio-economic and ethnic inequality in education

Item does not contain fulltextSince the 1960s The Netherlands has produced policy to combat educational inequalities stemming from the social milieu and ethnicity of pupils. This policy has evolved from local to central policy and back again to a decentralised level. The initial focus on disadvantaged native Dutch pupils in big cities has shifted to immigrant groups and – at the time of writing – to disadvantaged pupils in general. According to many, the various policies have produced disappointing results. The under-performance of children with under-educated parents from ethnic minorities are still quite large while the under-performance of children of native Dutch working-class parents is somewhat smaller but still substantial. This article gives an overview of the various policies that were implemented over time. It also devotes attention to the outcomes of the policies and the current state of affairs with regard to the achievements and attainment in education of disadvantaged children. In closing, it places the findings in an international perspective and discusses reasons for the policies' disappointing lack of success