Comparing and learning from English and American higher education access and completion policies

England and the United States provide a very interesting pairing as countries with many similarities, but also instructive dissimilarities, with respect to their policies for higher education access and success. We focus on five key policy strands: student information provision; outreach from higher education institutions; student financial aid; affirmative action or contextualisation in higher education admissions; and programmes to improve higher education retention and completion. At the end, we draw conclusions on what England and the US can learn from each other. The US would benefit from following England in using Access and Participation Plans to govern university outreach efforts, making more use of income-contingent loans, and expanding the range of information provided to prospective higher education students. Meanwhile, England would benefit from following the US in making greater use of grant aid to students, devoting more policy attention to educational decisions students are making in early secondary school, and expanding its use of contextualised admissions. While we focus on England and the US, we think that the policy recommendations we make carry wider applicability. Many other countries with somewhat similar educational structures, experiences, and challenges could learn useful lessons from the policy experiences of these two countries

Ação afirmativa na educação superior: o caso de Kerala na Índia

Um debate duradouro lançado por Pierre Bourdieu e Jean-Claude Passeron em The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture (1964) é se as forças que mantém a hierarquia social e sua concomitante distribuição de vantagens e desvantagens podem ser quebradas de forma genuína, significativa e duradoura. Por meio do caso do Estado de Kerala na Índia, o presente artigo considera o papel das forças históricas na mediação do impacto de uma política de ação afirmativa na educação superior a nível nacional. Devido a uma combinação de fatores, incluindo seu legado de matrilinidade e a experiência com o comunismo, Kerala expandiu, de maneira bem-sucedida, o acesso à educação superior para alunos de castas baixas, incluindo mulheres, em uma proporção que ainda não foi concretizada no restante da Índia