International Higher Education

In the United States, developing human capital for both economic and social benefit is an idea as old as the nation itself and led to the emergence of world’s first mass higher education system. Now most other nations are racing to expand access to universities and colleges and to expand their role in society. Higher education is growing markedly in its importance for building a culture of aspiration and, in turn, the formation of human capital, the promotion of socioeconomic mobility, and the determination of national economic competitiveness. This paper outlines a convergence of...

Is public tertiary education really in a crisis, and, if so, what is the crisis about? This paper analyses international aggregated data and examines to what extent there has been a crisis of public tertiary education in OECD countries in the past decade. It first focuses on relative enrolments in the public and private sectors to show that enrolments in the public sector have not significantly declined, and only marginally benefited the private for-profit sector. It then analyzes changes in the funding of tertiary education from the perspectives of tertiary education institutions,...

Charles Vest gave the second of three Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society on April 21, 2005 on the Santa Barbara campus. The Age of the Internet presents remarkable opportunities for higher education and research in the United States and throughout the world. The rise of a meta-university of globally shared teaching materials and scholarly archives, undergirding campuses everywhere, both rich and poor, could well be a dominant, democratizing aspect of the next few decades. Even as we develop the meta-university and other forms of digitally empowered educational...

This paper highlights the political, economic, socio-cultural, ethical, philosophical, legal, and practical aspects of the far-reaching theme of international trends in private higher education, in general. It also focuses on the driving forces, causes and consequences of the emergence of private higher education in India during the last three decades, in particular. Though there has been more acceptance of private higher education institutions in India today than the ‘trepidation’ felt at their emergence three decades ago, certain basic questions about its role remain. Is the...