System differentiation in England: the imposition of supply and demand

This chapter describes changing state and sector policy in relation to differentiation and how it has emerged in the English HE context: specifically, the attempts to concentrate the highest qualified applicants and the most prestigious institutions in a 'premium' market segment; the significance of the growing involvement of private providers; and the rise of the ‘student-as-consumer’ and 'value for money' in recent government policy discourse (e.g. the White Papers Students at the Heart of the System (DBIS 2011a) and Success as a Knowledge Economy (DBIS 2016). The chapter situates the development of a market hierarchy (in the form of a vertical differentiation of institutions, Archer 2007) following the demise of the university-polytechnic binary system in 1992 (Further and Higher Education Act, HMSO 1992). This co-existed for several years with the institutional diversity often celebrated by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (e.g. HEFCE 1994; 2000) that can be conceptualised as the horizontal differentiation of valued types of higher education provision and provider (e.g. part-time or vocationally orientated). The introduction of market mechanisms, in various stages beginning with the 2004 Higher Education Act (DfES 2004) and the introduction of variable tuition fees, coincided with the publication of institutional league tables from 2005. Taken together, these have reinforced a hierarchical system in which all institutions and courses are henceforth differentiated only by reference to a set of criteria dominated by the entry requirements demanded, and the amount of research carried out by the institution. Given the implications of the most recent legislation – the Higher Education and Research Act (HMSO 2017) this hierarchy is likely to be matched by one signalled by tuition fee levels, as new cheaper 'challenger' institutions come to the market

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

Relaciones entre la Asociación Profesional y la Academia. Notas desde la Universidad Nacional

Una amplia mirada al avance de la Terapia Ocupacional en Colombia permite identificar dos sustentos organizacionales básicos: la Asociación Profesional y la Academia. Desde los años 70, se han ido conjugando esfuerzos conjuntos para establecer relaciones mutuas que, de forma simultánea, han impulsado el desarrollo de una profesión joven