Table Of ContentHigher Education and the Common Good
Higher Education and the Common Good
Simon Marginson
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING
An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited
Level 1, 715 Swanston St, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
[email protected]
www.mup.com.au
First published 2016
Text © Simon Marginson, 2016
Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2016
This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part
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Text design by Phil Campbell
Cover design by Phil Campbell
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
Printed in Australia by OPUS Group
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Title: Higher education and the common good / Simon Marginson.
ISBN: 9780522871111 (hardback)
ISBN: 9780522871098 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780522871104 (ebook)
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: Education, Higher—Australia.
Universities and colleges—Graduate work.
Common good.
Creator: Marginson, Simon, author.
Contents
Figures
Tables
Preface
Part I Historical sociology of higher education
1 Great expectations
2 High participation and social inclusion
3 Anglo-American higher education and inequality
Part II Political economy of higher education
4 Public and private goods in higher education
5 Public goods and public good
6 Limits of human capital theory
7 Limits of capitalist markets in higher education
8 Limits of global university ranking
Part III Positional competition and the common good
9 Diversity, stratification and equity
10 The case of Australia
11 Conclusion
References
Index
Figures
Figure 2.1: Changes in world population, world GDP (constant prices) and total world
student enrolment in tertiary education, 1970–2013
Figure 2.2: Proportion of population living in urban areas and Gross Tertiary Enrolment
Ratio, world’s largest nations by population, arranged in order of intensity of
urbanisation, 2011
Figure 2.3: Gross Tertiary Enrolment Ratio, proportion of labour working in agriculture and
proportion of the population living in urban areas, Indonesia, 1990 to 2013
Figure 3.1: Gross Tertiary Enrolment Ratio for North America and Western Europe (region),
United States, United Kingdom and Australia, 1971–2014
Figure 4.1: Combining the economic and political definitions of public/private goods in
higher education: four quadrants, four political economies of higher education
Tables
Table 2.1: Gross Tertiary Enrolment Ratio (GTER), world regions and ten largest countries
by population, 1972, 1992 and 2012
Table 2.2: Higher education systems with Gross Tertiary Enrolment Ratios of more than 50
per cent, and systems producing more than 3000 research papers, 2013
Table 5.1: McMahon’s (2009) estimates of the public and private benefits of college
education in the United States: average college graduate, 4.5 years of education
Table 5.2: Variations in national political economy, society, culture and higher education:
United States, Finland, Russia and China compared
Table 8.1: Evaluation of six university ranking systems
Table 10.1: Higher education in Australia: volume, research, student selectivity, 2012–2014
Table 10.2: Leading eight research universities, Australia: international student numbers and
revenues, 2014
Preface
It was a happy experience to work on Higher Education and the Common Good as the
chapters rolled out, with the final three written ‘on the stone’ in the last week of July 2016.
Writing any serious book carries with it the pangs and pleasures of creativity, as the adrenalin
dips and rises. As one San Francisco band put it: ‘Sometimes the light’s all shining on me …
Other times I can barely see.’ The writing was also a good experience for more specific
reasons. The argument in this book is one that needs to be made. Working on the book has
been an opportunity to open a larger space for thinking about the public contributions of
higher education. As in previous work, I have been compelled by the questionable
foundations, gaps and internal tensions in the standard thinking about higher education and
its social and economic roles. The survival of human capital theory this long as the dominant
idea about relations between individuals, higher education and paid work is really quite
remarkable, given that many factors other than education contribute to earnings. The faith
that the installation of competitive markets in higher education will lead to better quality and
greater responsiveness to the needs of students would be touching in its naivety if it was not
also so destructive. The inability of economics to adjust for the particular character of social
production in the higher education sector, and in the education sector more generally,
continues to do much damage.
Working on the book reminded me of the need for a wider ranging and integrated
account of higher education, which might be called a theorisation of higher education. This is
something that has not been attempted since Burton R. Clark’s Higher Education System
(1983).
The book was also affected by its immediate conditions of production. First, the final
manuscript was touched by current events. It was prepared in London in the immediate
aftermath of the 23 June 2016 referendum decision to take the United Kingdom out of the
European Union (‘Brexit’) on a vote of 52/48. Higher education institutions are among the
most European of British social sectors, and the decision to leave the EU threatened to undo
part of the web of relationships in which they make some of their best and most important
contributions to the world. Voting behaviour showed a strong correlation between being
university educated and wanting to retain the cosmopolitan connection to Europe; and
correspondingly, not being university educated and wanting to leave the EU. It was not
unlike the electoral polarisation generated in the Donald Trump presidential campaign in
2016 in the United States: the split between on one hand educated cosmopolitan modernists
in the professional economy, and on the other hand those whose identity was grounded less in
education, career and mobility and more in locality, kinship and a visceral and nostalgic
patriotic identity (‘Give us back our country!’ in the UK; ‘Make American great again!’ in
the United States). There was evidence during the United Kingdom referendum of rejection
of the views of ‘experts’, particularly in communities that had suffered the sharp end of
government austerity policies, and that the universities and the European Union had become
lumped together with the City of London and other beneficiaries of growing income
inequality in the country. In the high capitalist United Kingdom, higher education was paying
the price for both its long association with elite formation and the recent emphasis on the
private economic benefits of degrees (salaries, ‘employability’), within a financing regime
where tuition charges are exceptionally high by world standards, without regard to the
broader public and collective benefits of the sector.
Higher Education and the Common Good is one response to that negative positioning of
higher education, and a celebration of the potentials offered by the multiple engagement of
higher education in society, within a cosmopolitan social democratic framework. In the
context of present Anglo-American debates (which have parallels in France and elsewhere),
empty posturing about the contribution of universities to local, national and global public
goods no longer has much cut through, if it ever did. Nevertheless, real observable activity of
higher education institutions, co-produced by the community and unaccompanied by
boosterism from university marketing, makes a tangible difference. The book also draws the
conclusion that unless Anglo-American higher education policy, and higher education
institutions themselves, begin to diminish the universities’ own effects in social inequality—
effects that show in the growing investment in private educational goods, the hyper-
competition and the sharp stratification of value that goes with it, the almost aristocratic
concentration of the power at the top—then higher education will not only fail to fulfil its
potential for the common good but also remain vulnerable to isolation and popular
resentment. Anglo-American higher education is not the driver of the political economy of
growing inequality in fractured societies but, with its relational and intellectual capabilities,
and its broad institutional architecture of participation, potentially higher education offers
one part of the solution. It does not have to be stratifying, and hence dividing. It can also be
inclusive, combinational, ameliorative and healing. Along with other changes in politics and
society, a democratised higher education sector can do much to build more equal and
generous societies. This will happen only if higher education is allowed to do so, and it
chooses to do so. Neither is guaranteed, and each is possible. There is much scope for agency
(and contingency) in public and political matters.
Second, my personal circumstances shaped the book. Despite the dislocations and
questions evoked by personal mobility, the never quite settled strangeness of removing on a
long-term basis from one’s roots, I am also fortunate in London. I am deeply grateful to my
wife Anna Smolentseva. Thank you also Ana Rosa and Sasha, not only for our shared life but
also for letting me work hard for a few days while the book was being finished. It is good to
communicate about these matters with my father Ray Marginson in Melbourne because we
share similar convictions and he understands the issues here. Likewise, collaborative thinking
and work with Brendan Cantwell, Ken Kempner, Rajani Naidoo, Imanol Ordorika, Brian
Pusser and Jussi Valimaa have been important. The book was partly shaped by ‘High-
participation systems of higher education’, a cross-country project started by Anna in
Moscow in 2013, which is leading to another book that we are all looking forward to. My
current writing has been much informed by the participants in that project: Dominik
Antonowicz, Brendan Cantwell, Isak Froumin, David Konstantinovsky, Marek Kwiek, Glen
Jones, Reetta Mohenon, Romulo Pinheiro, Anna Smolentseva, Jussi Valimaa and Aki
Yonezawa.
At the ESRC/HEFCE Centre for Global Higher Education, located at the UCL Institute
of Education in University College London, I am fortunate to work alongside Claire
Callender, Carolyn Gallop and Anna Phillips, among other fine colleagues. I especially thank
Aline Courtois, whose reading of the penultimate manuscript led to a significant clarification.
As a professorial associate of the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the
University of Melbourne I am glad to retain an association with that University. Thank you to
Glyn Davis for continuing fruitful correspondence about the matters herein, and also to
Richard James and Sophie Arkoudis. Fazal Rizvi has been a great friend and influence,
wherever we have each been based in the world.
The book had its origins in a conversation with Louise Adler at Melbourne University
Publishing (MUP) in 2007. I sincerely thank Louise for her patience. Higher Education and
the Common Good has been long in coming, it has had other names at different times, but
perhaps it is a better book than would have been written in 2008, before the ideas in chapters
2–4 had been developed. Production of the book has been facilitated by the speed and care
with which it has been handled by Catherine McInnis at MUP. Thank you also to Cathryn
Game who copyedited the manuscript.
Higher Education and the Public Good draws partly on previously published work. I
would like to thank the following for permission to use relevant materials:
• Ohio State University Press and editor Scott Thomas in relation to chapter 2, parts of
which were published in 2016 as ‘High-participation systems of higher education’,
Journal of Higher Education, 87(2): 243–70.
• Springer and editors Andrew Harvey, Catherine Burnheim and Matthew Brett in relation
to chapter 3, parts of which were published in 2016 in their book Student Equity in
Australian Higher Education.
• Taylor & Francis and editor V. Lyn Meek in relation to chapter 4, largely published in
2016 as ‘Public/private in higher education: A synthesis of economic and political
approaches’, online in Studies in Higher Education.
• Taylor & Francis and editor Stephen Ball in relation to chapter 7, largely published in
2013 as ‘The impossibility of capitalist markets in higher education’, Journal of
Education Policy, 28(3): 353–70.
• John Wiley & Sons and editors Richard Desjardins and Janet Loone in relation to chapter
8, large parts of which were published in 2014 as ‘University rankings and social
science’, European Journal of Education, 49(1): 45–59.
Simon Marginson
UCL Institute of Education
University College London
31 July 2016
