Anna Smolentseva – författare

Higher Education has become a central institution of society, building individual knowledge, skills, agency, and relational social networks at unprecedented depth and scale. Within a generation there has been an extraordinary global expansion of Higher Education, in every region in all but the poorest countries, outstripping economic growth and deriving primarily from familial aspirations for betterment. By focusing on the systems and countries that have already achieved near universal participation, High Participation Systems of Higher Education explores this remarkable transformation. The world enrolment ratio, now rising by 10 per cent every decade, is approaching 40 per cent, mostly in degree-granting institutions, including three quarters of young people in North America and Europe. Higher Education systems in the one in three countries that enrol more than 50 per cent are here classified as 'high participation systems'.Part I of the book measures, maps, and explains the growth of participation, and the implications for society and Higher Education itself. Drawing on a wide range of literature and data, the chapters theorize the changes in governance, institutional diversity, and stratification in Higher Education systems, and the subsequent effects in educational and social equity. The theoretical propositions regarding high-participation Higher Education developed in these chapters are then tested in the country case studies in Part II, presenting a comprehensive enquiry into the nature of the emerging 'high participation society'.

Despite the broad engagement of higher education institutions in most social sectors, limited thinking and hyper-individualistic approaches have dominated discussions of their value to society. Advocating a more rigorous and comprehensive approach, this insightful book discusses the broad range of contributions made by higher education and the many issues entailed in theorising, observing, measuring and evaluating those contributions.Prepared by a group of leading international scholars, the chapters investigate the multiple interconnections between higher education and society and the vast range of social, economic, political and cultural functions carried out by universities, colleges and institutes and their personnel. The benefits of higher education include employable graduates, new knowledge via research and scholarship, climate science and global connections, and the structuring of economic and social opportunities for whole populations, as well as work and advice for government at all levels. Higher education not only lifts earnings and augments careers, it also immerses students in knowledge, helps to shape them as people, and fosters productivity, democracy, tolerance and international understanding. The book highlights the value added by higher education for persons, organisations, communities, cities, nations, and the world. It also focuses on inequalities in the distribution of that value, and finds that the tools for assessing higher education are neither adequate nor complete as yet.International and interdisciplinary in scope, this book will prove an invaluable resource to students and scholars of higher education, educational policy and social policy. It will also prove a useful resource to both university executives and tertiary education policymakers who want to make higher education more effectively accountable to the public.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This open access book is a result of the first ever study of the transformations of the higher education institutional landscape in fifteen former USSR countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.