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Trove Martin
Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher
Education.
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Berkeley,
Calif.
73
57p.
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1947 Center
Street, Berkeley, California 94704 (Free)
MF-$0.75 HC-$3.15 PLUS POSTAGE
*Educational Problems; Enrollment; *Financial
Problems; *Growth Patterns; *Higher Education;
*Universal Education
ABSTRACT
In every advanced society the problems of higher
education are problems associated with growth. Growth poses a variety
of problems for the education systems that experience it and for the
societies that support them. These problems arise in every part of
'higher education--in its finance, in its governwent and
administration; in its recruitment and selection of students; in its
curriculum and forms of instruction; in its recruitment, training,
and socialization of staff--growth has its impact on every form of
activity and manifestation of higher education. This essay argues
that the problems facing higher education can be understood better as
different manifestations of a related cluster of problemu, and that
they arise out of the transition from one phase to another in a broad
pattern of development of higher education, a transition from elite
to mass higher education, and subsequently to universal access.
Underlying this pattern of development are growth and expansion.
(Author/MdM)
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Problems in the Transition from
Elite to Mass Higher Education
By MARTIN TROW
In every advanced society the problems of higher education are
problems associated with growth. Growth poses a variety of problems
for the educational systems that experience it and for the
societies that support them. These problems arise in every part
of higher education in its finance; in its government and administration;
in its recruitment and selection of students; in its curriculum
and forms of instruction; in its recruitment, training, and
socialization of staff; in the setting and maintenance of standards;
in the forms of examinations and the nature of qualifications
awarded; in student housing and job placement;' in motivation
and morale; in the relation of reseach to teaching; and in the relation
of higher education to the secondary school system on one
hand, and to adult education on the other growth has its impact
on every form of activity and manifestation of higher education.
In most of the writing on higher education in recent years,
these problems are treated in isolation. Curriculum reform and
finance and administration are commonly discussed by different
people, with different methods and assumptiOns and often with
different values; they are reported in different conferences and
published in different journals for different audiences. Similarly,
discussions of student unrest and disruptions in the universities
more often make reference to student po'tics and ideology than
to the changing relation of higher education to the occupational
structures of advanced industrial societies. This essay will argue
that these problems can be understood better as different manifestations
of a related cluster of problems, and that they arise out
of the transition from one phase to another in a broad pattern of
development of higher education, a transition under way in
every advanced society from elite to mass higher education and
Ni AMIN' TROW is a Professor of Sociology in the Graduate School. of
Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.
1
2--
subsequently to universal access.' Underlying this pattern of
development lies growth and expansion.
Aspects of Growth
The growth of higher education manifests itself in at least three
quite different ways, and these in turn give rise to different sets
of problems. There is first the rate of growth: in many countries
of Western Europe the numbers of students in higher education
doubled within five-year periods during the decade of the sixties
and are doubling again in seven, eight, or ten years by the middle
of the 1970s. Second, growth obviously affects the absolute size
both of systems and individual institutions. And third, growth is
reflected in changes in the proportion of the relevant age grade
enrolled in institutions of higher education.
Each of these manifestations of growth carries its own peculiar
problems in its train. For example a high growth rate places great
strains on the existing structures of governance, of administration,
and above all of socialization. When a very large proportion of
all the members of an institution are new recruits, they threaten
to overwhelm the processes whereby recruits to a more slowly
growing system are inducted into its value system and learn its
norms and forms. When a faculty or department grows from, say,
5 to 20 members within three or four years, and when the new
staff are predominantly young men and women fresh from postgraduate
study, then they largely define the norms of academic
life in that faculty and its standards. And if the postgraduate
student population also grows rapidly and there is loss of a close
apprenticeship relationship between faculty members and students,
then the student culture becomes the chief socializing force
for new postgraduate students, with consequences for the intellectual
and academic life of the institution that we have seen in
America as well as in France, Italy, West Germany, and Japan.
High growth rates increase the chances for academic innovation;
they also weaken the forms and processes by which teachers and
students are inducted into a community of scholars during periods
of stability or slow growth.
'This paper develops and extends ideas 1 first sketched out in two earlier
essays, "Reflections on the Transition from Mass to Universal Higher Education,"
Daedalus, 'Winter, 1970, and "The Expansion and Transformation of
Higher Education," The International Review of Education, February, 1972,
-3
Absolute size has a variety of consequences for academic life.
Growth may take the form of very large institutions, or of a very
large system, or of both. When growth results in large institutions
it has effects cal the nature of the milieux in which teaching and
learning and research go on. Large size affects the norms as well
as the structures of higher education. For example, there is an
academic norm, quite appropriate to the relatively small institutions
of elite higher education, which prescribes that an academic
man has an obligation to be of help with his time, advice, and so
forth to anyone in any discipline in his own university, and to
anyone in his own discipline anywhere in the world. During the
last two decades in every advanced country in the world the numbers
in almost every discipline have grown very substantially,
while many institutions have doubled, tripled, or quadrupled their
size. The norms of academic life have not significantly changed
over this time. And that gives rise to what might be called a pattern
of "institutionalized distraction." Academic men of middle
and senior rank find that the number of requests for demands on
their time and attention increase at least in proportion with the
growth in the numbers of "relevant colleagues" and probably
much faster, given the patterns of communication in scholarly
life. The whole level of pace and activity increases: men are
invited to consult on other people's projects, to go to increasing
numbers of conferences, to referee more papers for more journals,
and to carry the much more complex burdens of administration
that are associated with large institutions and systems. It becomes
increasingly difficult for academic men to protect the uninterrupted
time that they need for fresh thinking about their subjects
or for carrying on their scholarly work and research, This is a
price paid for growth that is rarely taken into account by students
of the costs and benefits of higher education. In response to increased
demands on people's time academic men begin to &vise
patterns of evasion: men spend less time in their offices and more
at home; they are more likely to take research leave away from
their institutions; they rely more on their research institutes and
centers. These centrifugal forces in turn tend to weaken the aca.
demic communities that have sustained the norms of academic
life, with very marked consequences both for the governance of
universities and for the training and socialization of students,
undergraduate and graduate.
4--
Growth affects the size of the national system as well as its
component units, and here the effects are primarily economic and
political. As a system grows it emerges from the obscurity of the
relatively small elite system with its relatively modest demands
on national resources, and becomes an increasingly substantial
competitor for public expenditures along with housing, welfare,
and defense. And as it does, higher education comes increasingly
to the attention of larger numbers of people, both in government
and in the general public, who have other, often quite legitimate,
ideas about where public funds should be spent, and, if given to
higher education, how they should be spent. The relation of
higher education to the state becomes increasingly critical the
bigger the system of higher education is; this is especially true in
most European countries, where the state and local governments
are almost the sole source of funds for higher education. Under
these conditions the questions of academic freedom and institutional
autonomy become central political questions, and not something
to be arranged, a; formerly, by a few old friends in the
universities and in the ministries of education and finance who
share very similar views of the world and who may well have
been to the elite universities together. Growth raises the question
of the relation of the state to higher education in new and disturbing
ways.
Growth also manifests itself in the growing proportions of the
age grade in any society enrolled in institutions of higher education.
In many European countries, that proportion, just after
World War II, was about 4 or 5 percent; it is now, only 25 years
later, between 10 and 20 percent. A few countries exceed the
upper figure. Growth in the proportions of the population that
have access to higher education raises a number of questions
central to the issue of mass higher education. For example, the
proportions entering higher education in every country vary
sharply in different regional groups, religious and ethnic groups,
and socioeconomic classes. Everywhere the proportions from the
upper and middle classes are significantly higher than from the
working classes or farmers. When the proportions of an age grade
going into higher education were very small, the political issue
of equality of educational opportunity was centered much more
on higher primary and secondary education. But the higher the
-5
proportion of the age grade going on to higher education, the
more the democratic and egalitarian concerns for equality of
opportunity come to center on the increasingly important sector
of tertiary education. These differences in access to higher education,
which are not reduced but rather increased during the
early stages of expansion, become a sharp political issue in the
context of the democratic and egalitarian values that are increasingly
strong in Western European countries, and these values
create strong pressures for reducing these differences in group
rates of enrollment. The more important access to higher education
is for the life chances of large number of students, the
stronger these pressures become. The persistent tendency of intellectually
elite institutions such as the universities to be also
the home of the social and economic elite, is a major source of
tension between the institutions of higher education and the increasingly
strong egalitarian values of Western society.
The rising rate of enrollment of an age grade has another
important significance, one not so directly political. As more students
from an age cohort go to college or university each year, the
meaning of college attendance changes first from being a privilege
to being a right, and then, as is increasingly true in the
United States; to being something close to an obligation. This
shift in the meaning and significarc of attendance in the tertiary
sector has enormous consequences for student motivation, and
thus also for the curriculum and for the intellectual climate of
these institutions. I will return to this question later in this essay.
Phases in the Development of Higher Education
On the extent and speed of expansion of European highed education
there is no question; indeed that story has been documented
in great detail in recent OECD publications. For example, Sweden
had 14,000 university students in 1947. By 1960 the number had
more than doubled to 35,000; by 1965 it had doubled again to
about 70,000 with another ddubling by 1971, when university
students comprised about 24 percent of the relevant age group.
France saw a growth in its university population between 1960
and 1965 of from 200,000 to over 400,000, with another doubling
projected by the mid-seventies, to an enrollment of about 17
percent of the age group. Denmark doubled its university student
population between 1960 and 1966 from 19,000 to 34,000;
6by
the mid-seventies it will double again to 70,000, about 13 percent
of the age group. In the United Kingdom the Robbins Report
anticipated university enrollments growing from about 130,000
in 1962 to 220,000 by 1973 and to nearly 350,000 by 1980. These
projections have already been substantially revised upward
toward 400,000 (about 13 percent of the age group) in all forms
of full-time higher education by 1973, and somewhere between
800,000 and 1,000,000 by 1981, with roughly half in universities.
What these numbers conceal are two fundamentally different
processes. One of these is the expansion of the elite universities
the growth of traditional university functions in traditional, if
somewhat modified, forms of universities. The other is the transformation
of elite university systems into systems of mass higher
education performing a great variety of new functions (at least
new to universities) for a much larger proportion of the university
age group. In Britain, as on the continent, growth, up to the
present, has mainly been achieved by expanding the elite university
system. But, I have argued, the old institutions cannot expand
indefinitely; they are limited by their traditions, organizations,
functions, and finance. In European countries, it is likely that an
increased enrollment in higher education beyond about 15 percent
of the age grade requires not merely the further expansion
of the elite university systems, but the rapid development of mass
higher education through the growth of popular nonelite institutions.
Mass higher education differs from elite higher education
not just quantitatively but qualitatively. They differ obviously in
the proportions of the age grade that they enroll, but also in the
ways in which students and teachers view attendance in university
or college; in the functions of gaining entry for the student;
in the functions of the system for the society; in the curriculum;
in the typical student's career; in the degree of student homo7
geneity; in the character of academic standards; in the size of institutions;
in the forms of instruction; in the relationships between
students and faculty; in the nature of institutional boundaries;
in the patterns of institutional administration and governance;
and in the principles and procedures for selecting both students
and staff. In other words, the differences between these phases
are quite fundamental and go through every aspect of higher education.
Let us look at each of these aspects of higher education in
its several phases a little more closely.
7
Aspects of Transition
Size of the system Countries that develop a system of elite
higher education in modern times seem able to expand it without
changing its character in fundamental ways until it is providing
places for about 15 percent of the age grade. At that point or
thereabouts the system begins to change its character; if the transition
is made successfully the system is then able to develop
institutions that can grow without being transformed until they
reach about 50 percent of the age grade. Beyond that, and thus
far only in the United States, large sections of the population are
sending nearly all-thehf sons and daughters to some kind of higher
education, and the system must again create new forms of higher
education as it begins to move rapidly toward universal access.
Attitudes toward acess The ease of access to higher education
is closely linked to conceptions that people students and
their parents, and increasingly college and university teachers
and administrators have of college and university attendance.
When access is highly limited, it is generally seen as a privilege,
either of birth or talent or both. Above about 15 percent of the
age grade, people increasingly begin to see entry to higher education
as a right for those who have certain formal qualifications.
And when the proportion of the whole population comes to be
about 50 percent, and in certain sectors of the society it is then
of course much higher, attendance in higher education is increasingly
seen as an obligation: for children from the middle and
upper middle classes,. in European countries as well as in the
United States, failure to go on to higher education from secondary
school is increasingly a mark of some defect of mind or
character that has to be explained or justified or apologized for.
Moreover, as more people go on to higher education, the best jobs
and opportunities and the economic rewards in life come to be
reserved for people who have completed a university degree, and
this greatly contributes to the sense of obligation that is felt by
many students on entry.
Functions of higher education The different phases are also
associated with different functions of higher education both for
students and for society at large. Elite higher education is concerned
primarily with shaping the mind and character of the ruling
class, as it prepares students for broad elite roles in govern-
8
rnent and the learned professions. In mass higher education, the
institutions are still preparing elites, but a much broader range
of elites that includes the leading strata of all the technical and
economic organizations of the society. And the emphasis shifts
from the shaping of character to the transmission of skills for more
specific technical elite roles. In institutions marked by universal
access there is concern for the first time with the preparation of
large numbers for life in an advanced industrial society; they are
training not primarily elites, either broad or narrow, but the whole
population, and their chief concern is to maximize the adaptability
of that population to a society whose chief characteristic is
rapid social and technological change.
The curriculum and forms of instruction The curriculum and
forms of instruction naturally reflect changes in the definition of
the meaning of being a student, and of the functions that higher
education plays for students and for the society at large. The curriculum
in elite institutions has tended to be highly structured,
reflecting academic conceptions of the degree course or professional
conceptions of professional requirements. The courses of
study, shaped largely by the character of the final examination,
were on the whole highly specialized, and governed by the professors'
notions of what constituted art educated man or a qualified
professional. In institutions of mass higher education, education
becomes more modular, marked by semistructured sequences of
courses, increasingly earning unit credits (the unit of exchange
in modular courses) allowing more flexible combinations of courses
and easier access and movement between major fields and indeed
among institutions.2 In universal higher education, as it emerges,
there is a survival of the modular course, but increasingly instruction
is relatively unstructured; the boundaries of the course itself
begin to break down as do required sequences of courses. It is
very difficult to justify course requirements where no single conception
of higher education obtains, and the rejection of academic
forms, structures, and standards also extends to examinations and
assessment, as distinctions between learning and life become
attenuated. Attendance at the emerging institutions of higher
education designed for universal access is merely another kind
2Unit credits and a modular curriculum are much more common in
higher technical colleges than in European universities.
-9
of experience not qualitatively different from any other experiences
in modern society which give one resources for coping with
the problems of contemporary life. And, in universal access, since
course work does not clearly qualify people for specific jobs it is
less clear why assessment of performances is necessary.
There are parallel differences in the typical forms of instruction
and thus in the relationships between student and teacher.
In elite systems, the characteristic form of instruction is the tutorial
or seminar, marked, on the whole, by a personal relationship
between student and teacher.3 This is compatible with the central
function of the shaping of character and the preparation of a
broad or general elite whose specific adult roles and activities
would vary widely so that one could hardly train for them in the
course of the university career. And the defense of these forms of
instruction in the "higher schools" of France during the period of
rapid expansion that filled the lecture rooms of the universities to
overflowing made it clear where the elite functions in France are
meant to survive.- Under the conditions of mass higher education
the emphasis is on the transmission of skill and knowledge, and
increasingly formal instruction is carried on,through large lectures
supplemented by seminars often taught by teaching assistants.
In "universal" higher education the direct personal relationship
of the student and teacher is subordinated to a broad exposure of
the student to new or more sophisticated perspectives. There is
heavier reliance on correspondence, on use of video cassettes and
TV's, and on computer and other technological aids to instruction.
. The student "career" The academic career of the student
differs also. In elite institutions the student ordinarily enters directly
after completion of secondary schooling; the student is "in
residence and continues his work uninterruptedly (except for
holidays) until he gains a degree. He is in this sense "sponsored"
and in competition only for academic honors. In the mass institution,
students also, for the most part, attend immediately after
finishing secondary school, although increasing numbers delay
entry until after a period of work or travel. Easier access and a
more heterogenous student population lead to higher ."wastage
While the distance between the senior professor and the ordinary undergraduate
may be very great, his research students are likely to be working
with him in a close apprentice relationship.
10--
rates." But the students are now a mixed residential-commuting
population as vocational training becomes a larger component of
higher education. In institutions of universal access there is much
postponement of entry, "stopping out" (i.e., periods when the student
is not in attendance), and large numbers of students with
experience in adult occupations. The emphasis on "lifelong learning"
is compatible with the softening of the boundaries between
formal education and other forms of life experience.
Moreover, as student numbers grow, with increasing numbers
from poor homes, a growing proportion are also working for pay
at nonacademic sobs first during vacations and then during term
time. 'Ibis trend has implications for the meaning of being a student,
for the curriculum (less outside reading and study can be
assigned or assumed), for student motivations, and for the relationships
of students with their teachers. And it is hard to discourage
this practice, especially when it is done out of necessity
by needy students. It can be ignored when it is the occasional
"poor but able" student who has to work for his fees and maintenance.
But it is a different institution when the proportion of
working students is 30, 40, or 50 percent. The provision of state
stipends for university students (as in Britain) is designed precisely
to permit the maintenance of elite forms of higher education
with a more "democratic" student intake. But the high and
growing costs of stipends ironically acts as a brake on expansion:
only one of the ways in which the principle of equality in higher
education is at odds with expansion. The growing interest in student
loans in several countries is a part of the effort to solve this
dilemma in ways that will protect the university against part-time
work by students. The "sandWich course" for technical and vocational
students is another "solution" that makes a virtue of necessity
by incorpormiq paid work into the regular curriculum,
Institutional diversity, characteristics, and boundariesSystems
at different phases of their development differ also in their
diversity. Elite systems tend to be highly homogenous, the component
institutions very much like one another. They tend to be
universities with high and common standards, though they may
include highly specialized "technical schools" with special access
to parts of the Civil Service. Mass systems begin to be more
"comprehensive," with more diverse standards, though with some
linkages among the several segments of the system that allow
11
mobility of students and staff. In systems of universal access there
is very great diversity in the character of component institutions,
with no common standards among them, Indeed the very notion
of standards is itself challenged and problematical.
The typical institutions in the three systems differ in size and
character as well, Elite institutions are commonly "communities"
that range up to two or three thousand students in residence. If
larger than three thousand they are "substructured" so that their
component units, such as the Oxford and Cambridge colleges,
tend to be relatively small. The comprehensive institutions that
characterize mass higher education are less "communities" than
they are "cities of intellect" with up to thirty or forty thousand
students and staff making up a mixed residential and commuting
population. Institutions of universal access are unlimited in size;
they may be simply aggregates of people enrolled for "instruction,"
most of whom are rarely or never on the central "campus";
they may share little in common and do not in any sense comprise
a community rooted in frequent association, shared norms and
values, and a sense of common identification.
As we might guess from the foregoing, elite institutions arc
marked off from the surrounding society very sharply by clear and
relatively impermeable boundaries, in the extreme case by physical
walls. In mass institutions there are still boundaries, but they
are more fuzzy and more permeable; there is relatively easy
movement' in and out of mass institutions, and a much less clear
concept of "membership," though there are still formal definitions
of membership that are relevant for a variety of academic and
nonacademic purposes. In institutions of universvl access, boundaries
are very weak, shading off to none at all. At some point anyone
who may switch on a televised broadcast of a lecture may be
thought of for that moment as being part of an "extended university,"
and the question of whether he is submitting work regularly
or has "matriculated" is of only marginal significance.'
4 It should not be thought that the Open University hi England, despite
its name, is a typical institution of universal access. On the contrary, it is
a characteristically ingenious way of increasing access to an elite institution
by substituting motivation for formal qualifications, and by allowing people
to combine university work with full-time employment. Some of the characteristics
of an elite university have been discarded, but the University maintains
the high standards of elite British universities and its very clear boundaries.
The Open University is an interesting transitional institution between
the elite and mass phases of British higher education.
12--
The locus of power and decision making The three types of
systems differ in their source of ultimate authority; in the nature
of their academic standards; and in their principles of recruitment
and selection. With respect both to ultimate power and effective
decisions, elite institutions are dominated by relatively small
elite groups: leaders in significant institutions political, economic,
and academic who know one another, share basic values
and assumptions, and make decisions through informal face-toface
contact. An example of this would be the small number of
leading civil servants, government ministers, university vice-chancellors,
and members of the University Grants Commission who
shaped the face of the British university system for many years in
small committee rooms or around tables at the Athenaeum Club.
Mass higher education continues to be influenced by these elite
groups, but is increasingly shaped by more "democratic" political
processes and influenced by "attentive audiences." These are parts
of the general public who have special interests and qualifications,
and develop a common view about higher education in general or
some special aspect, such as the forms and content of technical
education, Higher education policies increasingly become subject
to the ordinary political processes of interest groups and party
programs. One kind of attentive audience is the employers of the
products of mass higher education, who are interested in the
nature of their skills and qualifications. Another attentive audience
is the body of "old graduates" who retain an interest in the
character and fortunes of their old university. These groups often
develop political instrumentalities of their own, such as associations
with an elected leadership, and develop lines of communication
to the smaller groups in government, legislatures, and the
universities themselves who make the actual decisions, both day
to day and over the long range. When the system moves toward
universal access, increasingly large portions of the population
begin to be affected by it, either through their own past or present
attendance, or that of some friend or relative. In addition the universities
and colleges what is taught there, and the activities of
their staff and students come to be of general interest, leave the
pages of the serious press and magazines, and are reported in the
popular journals and on television. They thus attract the interest
of mass publics that increasingly come to see themselves as hay-
-13
ing a legitimate ink: 1st in what goes on in the institutions of
higher education, if for no other reason than their enormous cost
and obvious impact on society. And those mass publics begin to
make their sentiments known, either through letters to public
officials or through their votes in special or general elections. The
change in the size and character of the publics who have an interest
in higher education and exert an influence on higher educational
policy greatly influences the nature and content of the
discussions about higher education, who takes part in them, and
the decisions that flow out of them. The claims of academic men
to a special expertise, and of their institutions to special privileges
and immunities, are increasingly questioned; much of what academie
men understand by academic freedom, and the significance
of the security of academic tenure for the protection of their pursuit
of truth regardless of political interests or popular sentiment,
all are challenged by the growing intervention of popular sentiments
into these formerly elite arenas.
Academic standards The implications for academic standards
are equally clear: in elite systems and institutions, at least in their
meritocratic phase, these are likely to be broadly shared and relatively
high. In the systems and institutions of mass higher education
standards become variable, differing in severity and eharae.-.
ter in different parts of the system or institution, appropriately so
since both system and institution have become holding companies
for quite different kinds of academic enterprises. In institutions of
universal access there tends to be a different criterion of achievement:
not so much the achievement of some academic standard,
as whether there has been any "value added" by virtue of the
educational experience. That is the justification of universal higher
education, as it is of the nonacademic forms of primary and secondary
school; obviously this changes in a fundamental way the
basis for judging individual or institutional activities. (For example,
if the criterion of success is "value added," it may be better to
admit students who are academically very weak, rather than those
with a strong record, since presumably it will be easier to raise the
performance of those who start low than of those who are already
performing well. That argument is in fact made for the principle
of "open access." Whatever substance it has, it does suggest how
fundamental is the shift to "universal access.")
14--
Access and selection The principles of student selection also
differ in the different phases. In elite systems the criterion of
ascribed status gave way more or less rapidly over the past century
to meritocratic achievement measured by secondary school
performance or grades on special examinations. In institutions of
mass higher education there is a general acceptance of meritocratic
criteria where access is limited, but this is qualified by a
commitment to equality of educational opportunity, leading to
"compensatory programs" and the introduction of additional nonacademic
criteria designed to reduce "inequities" in the opportunities
for admission of deprived social groups and categories.
In the institutions of universal higher education, which by definition
are wholly "open" either to anyone who wishes to join or to
those who have certain minimal educational qualifications, the
criterion is whether an individual has chosen to associate himself
with the institution voluntarily. The aim of universal access is
toward the equality of group achievement rather than an equality
of individual opportunity, and efforts are made to achievea social,
class, ethnic, and racial distribution in higher education reflecting
that of the population at large. And of course the more nearly the
system enrolls the whole of an age grade, the more closely it
reflects the distribution of subgroups in the population at large.
At the limiting case, of course, it is "democratic" in the same sense
that compulsory forms of primary and secondary education are,
with surviving variations in the character and quality of the education
offered in different places and different kinds of institutions.
We can already see hints of this philosophy of admissions
and of these criteria for access even in the present transitional
period between mass and elite higher education in European
countries.
Forms of academic administration The characteristic institutions
in the three systems differ also in their forms of institutional
administration. The typical elite university is governed by
part-time academics who are essentially amateurs at administration.
In some countries they may have the help of a full-time civil
servant or registrar to deal with routine matters of financial problems.
But the head of the administrative staff is commonly an
academic elected or appointed to the office for a limited period
of time. As institutions become larger and their functions more
varied in the phase of mass higher education, their administrative
-15
staff becomes linger; there is now more commonly a top leadership
of men who were formerly academics but who now are
clearly full-time university administrators. And below them there
is a large and growing bureaucratic staff. As the system grows
even further toward universal access the enormous costs generate
pressures for greater financial accountability and more F ophis
t icated forms of program management. Universities employ
increasingly large numbers of full-time professionals, such as systems
analysts and economists knowledgeable in program budgeting.
The rationalization of university administration generates
problems in that phase, since the functions of the institution itself
have become increasingly more diverse, and its "outputs" more
difficult to quantify, as the management procedures have become
more dependent on quantified data for the assessment of costs
and benefits.
The rationalization of university administration based on the
systematic collection and analysis of quantitative data on the costs
of discrete activities, and on measures of the "outputs" or "benefits"
of these activities, is a response to the growth of the size and
cost of higher education, and to growing demands for public
accountability regarding its "efficiency." In their heavy reliance
on quantified data, however, these managerial techniques become
a powerful independent force working against the survival of
elite institutions, functions, and activities that cannot be easily
justified by reference to quantitative measures either of their
"costs" or "benefits."5
But the development of mass higher education does not necessarily
involve the destruction of elite institutions or parts of institutions,
or their transformation into mass institutions. Indeed, elite
forms of higher education continue to perform functions that
cannot be performed as well by mass higher education among
them, the education, training, and socialization of very highly
'There is a certain danger in the argument that the development of these
managerial techniques, as also of the increasing centralization of control,
are "inevitable," given the growth in the size and cost of higher education,
An emphasis on the "inevitability" of these trends and forces may preclude
our asking the critical questions: how are these new techniques of administration
being applied, what are their consequences, and what are the limits
of centralization in relation to institutional autonomy? We should at least
be aware of how these techniques may undermine those activities and functions
of higher education that cannot be justified by reference to visible and
easily measurable "outputs."
16
selected students for intellectual work at the highest standards of
performance and creativity. And as we observe the system of mass
higher education in the United States and the patterns of growth
toward mass higher education elsewhere, we see that it involves
the creation and extension of functions and activities and institutions
rather than the disappearance of the
But while elite institutions and centers tend to survive and
defend their unique characteristics in the face of the growth and
transformation of the system around them, they are not always
successful. Their special characteristics and integrity are threatened
by those egalitarian values that define all differences as
inequities; by the standardizing force of central governmental
control; and by the powerful leveling influence of the new forms
of rationalized management and administration. The rationalization
of academic administration is a reflection and a product of
the movement toward mass higher education; but it is not neutral
toward other forms of higher education. In this respect it works
against the diversity of the system that is also a characteristic
indeed, a central defining characteristic of mass higher education.
And this creates a dilemma to which I will return later in
this paper.
Internal governance The forms and processes of internal
governance of institutions of higher education vary enormously,
from country to country and between institutions. But on the
whole, elite institutions everywhere tend to be governed by their
senior professors;° those who do not hold chairs ordinarily play
little or no part in major institutional decisions. As institutions,
and especially their nonprofessorial staff, grow, the latter increasingly
challenge the monopolistic power of what comes to be seen
as a "professorial oligarchy." And in mass higher education, internal
power comes to be shared to varying degrees with junior staff.
Moreover, students increasingly claim a right to influence institutional
decisions, and the forms and extent of student participation
become a major issue during the transition from elite to mass
higher education.
e Problems of institutional governance are greatly sharpened by
8Oxford and Cambridge, with their "aristocratic egalitarianism" among
the whole body of teachers (dons), are an exception to this general rule.
Sc e A. IL Halsey and Martin Trow, The British Academics, 1971, especially
Chapter 6.
-17
the breakdown of the academic consensus that occurs with growth
and the transition from elite to mass higher education. Elite universities,
with their narrow traditional range of functions and
homogeneous bodies of students and teachers, could assume the
broad acceptance by their participants of the basic character and
values of the institution. But the movement toward mass higher
education, with its wider rangu of functions, means the recruitment
of new kinds of students and teachers, from more diverse
backgrounds and with more varied views and conceptions of what
higher education and their own institutions ought to be. At the
same time, junior staff, whose interests and attitudes often differ
sharply from those of the senior professors, are gaining in power
and influence. And students, drawn from more diverse backgrounds
and affected by radical political currents, challenge many
of the traditional values and assumptions of the university. In
many institutions, the old consensus on which elite universities
were based has broken down, both within the faculty and among
the students.' Relations among colleagues and between teachers
and students no longer can be built on a broad set of shared
assumptions, but are increasingly uncertain and a source of continual
strain and conflict. The move toward participatory forms
of governance often presupposes the survival of the.old consensus,
or the possibility of its re-creation. But if that is an illusion, as I
believe, then participatory forms of democracy may introduce
into the institutions of mass higher education the conflicts of interest
and ideology that are more familiar (and more easily managed)
in the political institutions of society.8
?The United States, as it moves toward universal access, is experiencing
strains in the somewhat different kind of consensus on which its multiversities
are based.
8This reference to student participation illustrates a general principle that
emerges from this analysis: that the "same" phenomenon may have very different
meaning and consequences in different phases of higher education.
Thus "student participation in the governance of a small elite institution,
marked by high value consensus, may in fact be merely the participation of
the most junior members of a corporate body. By contrast, "student participation"
in a large mass institution marked by value dissensus may heighten
the kind of interest and ideological conflicts that academic institutions, whatever
their size or character, have great difficulty in containing or resolving.
This is not always recognized; and the arguments for student participation
drawn from experience in elite universities is often applied indiscriminately
to mass institutions. (This is true of other aspects of governance and forms
of administration as well.)
18
The politicization of the university is a familiar problem in
almost all advanced societies, and the theme of much current
literature. Its solution *nay be linked to the larger problem of
devising structures that sustain educational diversity within an
emerging system of mass higher education while allowing its
component institutions and units to preserve their own unique
identities, a narrower range of functions, and staff and students
who share attitudes and values appropriate to their own institution.
Consensus within units is whoity compatible with variety
and diversity of forms and conceptions of higher education between
units and within the larger system. But if the diversity of
the whole system is reflected in each of its component units, the
problems of institutional governance may become almost insoluble;
and in that event, as we see in some countries already, effective
power and decision making inevitably flow out of the colleges
and universities into the hands of political authorities whose authority
is based not on their roles in higher education but on the
political processes of the larger society. The breakdown of institutional
governance arising out of value dissensus and fiercely
politicized conflicts of values and interests tends to weaken the
autonomy of an institution: someone has to make decisions and
account for public funds in ways broadly acceptable to the society
at large; if this cannot be done inside the institution, then it will
be done by outsiders or their appointees.
Caveats
There are several important caveats to be made before I develop
this perspective further.
1. The three phases elite, mass, and universal education
are, in Max \Veber's sense, ideal types. They are abstracted from
empirical reality, and emphasize the functional relationships
among the several components of an institutional system common
to all advanced industrial societies rather than the unique characteristics
of any one. Therefore, the description of any phase
cannot be taken as a full or adequate description of any single
national system.
2. These ideal types are designed to define and illuminate the
problems of higher education common to a number of countries.
These problems are of three broad kinds:
-19
(a) The functional relationships among the various components
or aspects of given systems; for exa:Iple, the degree
of compatibility or strain between a given pattern of student
admissions and the dominant forms of university
en rriculum.
(b) The problems arising during the transition from one phase
to the next when existing, more or less functional, relationships
are progressively disrupted by uneven and
differently timed changes in the patterns and characteristics
of the system. An example might be the survival of
the professorial oligarchy as a mode of institutional, faculty,
or departmental governance as the growth in the
numbers and functions of junior staff increases their responsibilities,
importance, and self-confidence.
(c) The problems arising in the relations between institutions
of higher education and the larger society and its economic
and political institutions, as higher education moves
from one phase to another. An example here might be the
greater concern for public "accountability" of funds spent
on higher education, and the greater interference in the
autonomy of higher educational institutions in the allocation
and use of these funds, as costs rise and the higher
educational system becomes more consequential and more
significant to a wider range of social, political, and economic
activities.
3. It must be emphasized that the movement of a system from
elite to mass higher education or from mass to universal higher
education, does not necessarily mean that the forms and patterns
of the prior phase or phases disappear or are transformed. On the
contrary, the evidence suggests that each phase survives in some
institutions and in parts of others while the system as a whole
evolves to carry the larger numbers of students and the broader
more diverse functions of the next phase. Its newest, and gradually
its most important, institutions have the characteristics of the
next phase. So, in a mass system elite institutions may not only
survive but flourish; and elite functions continue to be performed
within mass institutions. (Similarly, both elite and mass institutions
survive as the United States moves toward universal access
20
to higher education.) But this observation points to a characteristic
problem of all mixed-phase systems: the problem arising
from the strains inherent in the continuing existence of forms of
higher education based on fundamentally different principles and
oriented to quite different kinds of functions. The question follows:
how successfully, through what institutions and mechanisms,
does a system continue to perform elite functions when the
emphasis of the system has shifted to the forms and functions of
mass higher education? How successfully can a system perform
diverse functions that require quite different structures, values,
and relationships especially when central governing agencies
are pressed, both by bureaucratic rules and egalitarian politics, to
treat institutions and individuals equally and in standard ways?
4. The analysis of the phases of development of higher education
should not be taken to imply that the elements and components
of a system of higher education change at equal rates,
and that a system moves evenly toward the characteristic forms
of the next phase. In fact, development is very uneven: numerical
expansion may produce a more diversified student body before
the curriculum has been similarly diversified; the curriclum may
become more diversified before the recruitment and training of
staff has changed to meet the new requirements of the changed
curriculum; the staff may have become more diverse before the
forms of institutional governance reflect the changes in the character
of university and college teachers, and begin to distribute
institutional authority to reflect more closely academic responsibility.
A close analysis of developments in any given system must
attend (a) to the sequence of change of its several parts and patterns;
(b) to the strains and problems arising therefrom; and (c)
to the extent to which the changes in different countries show
common sequential patterns among the various parts and elements
of their systems.
In short, the analysis of the phases of higher education in
advanced industrial societies, of the developments of parts of the
system during these phases, and of the problems that arise at the
transition points between phases and among elements changing
at different rates within a phase, are designed to illuminate problems
and patterns common to different societies and systems.
-21
Variations In the Patterns of Change
There arc several questions we may ask about the patterns of
change in the course of the growth and transformation of higher
education in advanced industrial societies.
1. Is there a characteristic pattern in the sequence of change
of systems of higher education? If there is, what is that pattern?
2. Which elements of higher education change more or less
easily and which are highly resistant to change in the course of
growth?
3. What are the consequences of variations in the rate of
change among the several elements of a system of higher
education?
I cannot do any more here than suggest tentative and pro--
visional answers to these questions.
The expansion of student numbers seems to precede other
institutional change in almost all cases. Systems of higher'education
do not characteristically modify their arrangements in anticipation
of growth. (Indeed the rate and amount of expansion, at
least in the earlier phases of growth spurts, is commonly underestimated.)
The one major exception to this was the "land-grant"
state universities in America after the Civil War, These institutions,
already democratic and comprehensive in conception, and
devoted to scholarship, vocational studies, and public service
equally, were far ahead of their time; they were, in fact, institutions
dedicated to mass higher education long before college and
university enrollments reached anything like the proportions that
characterize mass higher education. This important development,
arising out of egalitarian values of the United States and the
role of education in its political philosophy, greatly eased the
transition from elite to mass higher education in that country.
Thus it is only experiencing now, in its move toward universal
higher education, the problems that European countries are experiencing
in their move from elite to mass higher education.
The growth of numbers, in itself, begins to change the conception
that students have of their attendance in college or university.
When enrollment rates are 4 or 5 percent of the age grade,
students naturally see themselves as part of a highly privileged
minority; although this does not mean that they are necessarily
passive or deferential, it does make them feel, along with their
22
professors and lecturers, part of a small privileged institution with
a very clear set of common interests embodied in common values,
symbols and ceremonies, modes of speech, and lifestyle. All that
affirmed the communal identity of the academic institution over
against the rest of society. Students might indeed be highly rebellious,
but their actions and demonstrations were typically directed
against state or political institutions rather than against members
of their own institution.
Growth toward 15 or 20 percent of the age grade, and, in
the larger European countries, toward student numbers of half a
million rather than fifty thousand, inevitably changed that. Students
have come to see their entry into a university as a right
earned by fulfilling certain requirements. And for some, an increasing
proportion, attendance is in part obligatory: larger numbers
in all countries attend university' at least partly because
people in their parents' social strata send their children to university
"as a matter of course." Such students feel less like members
of a chosen elite on arrival, and they enter universities that are
larger ( and in some cases very much larger) than their counterparts
of 20 years ago. These big institutions are marked in many
cases by impersonality, turbulence, and continuing political activity.
There is little question that the "communal" aspects of
universities have declined along with the sense on the part of the
students and teachers of their being members of a special "estate."
The growth of numbers and the shift in the conception of
attendance from privilege to right is accompanied by changes in
the principles and processes of selection. As the gates gradually
open, the older almost exclusive links between a handful of elite
preparatory, schools (whether private or state supported) and the
universities become attenuated, and new avenues of access to
higher education begin to open up. Logically, if the move toward
mass education were state policy and carefully planned, the development
of a broad system of "comprehensive" secondary schools,
carrying larger and larger numbers from every social strata to the
point of university entry, would precede the growth of mass
higher education itself. In practice, however, the explosive expansion
of higher education over the past two decades has almost
everywhere preceded the move toward comprehensive secondary
education. (The exceptions here again are the United States,
23
where universal comprehensive education had been achieved by
World War II when enrollments in higher education were only
about 15 percent, and Sweden, where the establishment of a fully
comprehensive secondary school system and the rapid move
toward mass higher education have proceeded by plan together.
over the past decade.) It is more true to say that mass higher
education is forcing the growth of a popular system of comprehensive
secondary education, rather than that the creation of the
latter has made possible the expansion of higher education. ( It is
true, however, that the continued growth of higher education beyond,
perhaps, 15 percent of the age grade, will depend on the
continued democratization of the secondary school system and
the transformation of more and more terminal secondary schools
into schools that qualify students for university entry.)
But the change in the principles underlying the preparation
and selection of university entrants has itself proceeded through
a series of phases:
1. First there was the simple principle of admitting those
"qualified" for entry according to more or less strict meritocratic
principles. This process, however, rested heavily on very marked
social inequalities in the opportunities to gain those qualification
opportunities almost exclusively offered by a small set of
elite academic preparatory schools. The demand for the abolition
of inequality was in the first instance met solely by an emphasis
on meritocratic procedures and criteria, without much regard for
the role of social inequality in affecting the chances of meeting
those criteria. Qualifications took such forms as Britain's passes
in its "A" level examinations or, in other countries, the successful
completion of the preparatory secondary school program and the
earning of a "Bac" or "abitur."
2. The set of complementary forces increasing democratic
pressures, needs of the economy, and the growth of higher education
itself lead to an expansion of those secondary schools
and streams that qualify for university entry. This phase is marked
by a growing concern for an increase in educational opportunities
that would enable "able" students from lower social strata to enter
university. Howevei, during this phase, the growth in student
members at university was very largely made up of an increase
in the proportion of middle-class students, who almost every-
24
where are the first to take advantage of increases in educational
opportunities of every kind and at every level.
3. In the third phase, partly as a result of the work of sociologists
and partly under political pressures, there emerges a clear
and more widespread recognition of the effect of social inequalities
on educational achievement. And this in turn leads to special
efforts to reduce the effects of those social inequalities. These
take the form of proposals to modify the structure of secondary
education, especially toward the comprehensive principle, or at
least the extension of the educational channels through which
access to higher education may be gained. In addition, there is a
call for efforts to compensate for the disadvantaging effects of
lower-class origins. Increasingly, schools and streams that formerly
led to vocational schools or simply to early termination of
formal education are modified to allow for university entry for
at least some of their students, at least in principle.
4. In the fourth stage (and in part because social inequalities
show everywhere a stubbornly persistent effect on educational
achievement, despite the best efforts of reformers), the egalitans
attack the selective principle of higher education in principle, and
demand "open access" to the universities (as at Vincennes) or a
greater expansion of nonuniversity institutions of higher education
that do not require the same formal academic qualifications
for entry as do the universities. This phase (clearly visible in the
United States though less so in European countries) marks a very
significant shift from the principle of equality of opportunity for
educational achievement, to more radical principles of equality of
educational achievement for all definable social groups and strata.
The principle of equality of individual opportunity is compatible
with the maintenance of meritocratic criteria for entry: the effort
is to enable more students from lower social strata to meet those
qualifications. The latter principle; the equality of group achievement,
affirms that social justice requires that students from all
social strata be equally represeated among all elite groups in society,
and this, at least in the short run, is incompatible with the
maintenance of most meritocratic criteria for admission, Needless
to say, even where put into practice, the principle of equality of
group achievement is usually introduced in a highly qualified or
compromised way, and immediately introduces very substantial
-25
problems, among them the relation of students in "open" institutions
to those in institutions still governed by meritocratic principles,
and also the significance of the qualifications earned in
institutions where meritocratic criteria have been subordinated to
other values (at Vincennes, for example, the French government
simply ceased to recognize its diplomas).
The question of the principles and processes of selection and
admission to higher education is the crucial point where higher
education touches most closely on the social structure. What
expansion does initially is to increase the opportunities for the
children of the middle classes to gain an education that still promises
to provide (though to a larger number of people) the dignified
and rewarding professional occupations and traditional social
status formerly reserved for a much smaller elite. While a detached
observer might suggest that tripling or quadrupling the
number of university graduates must reduce the special status
and privileges accorded to the "graduate," it does not appear so
at the time to participants in the process for example, to the
parents of the would-be university entrant. And resistance to
expansion say from 5 to 15 percent of the age grade has almost
everywhere been remarkably weak in the face of democratic
values and presumed economic needs. But already the "overproduction"
of university graduates for the traditional graduate
occupations is causing misgivings among conservatives, who are
beginning to see more and more clearly that mass higher education
is a corrosive solvent of traditional social relations, status,
hierarchies, and privileged access to elite careers. As a larger number
of working-class youth begin to enter university, the impact
of university expansion on the life chances of upper middle-class
youth will become even more visible and threatening. It is hard
to imagine a successful move to end the expansion of higher
education, although that is certainly talked about in conservative
circles in all Western countries. But the establishment of
different sectors of higher education, reflecting the status hierarchies
in the larger society, is a more effective way of using
higher education to buttress rather than undermine the class
structure. It would be useful to examine and compare the history
and development of modes of access to higher education in different
advanced industrial societies, to see just how they have
28
moved through the phases I have sketched, and where they
are now.
I have suggested that after expansion itself, the earliest and
most rapid changes in the system occur in the meaning of university
student status, and in the principles of admission. But
other components of the system are more resistant and slower to
change. And that is because while the decision to expand, the
definition of attendance, and the rules for admission are governed
largely by forces outside the university, the curriculum, the forms
of administration and internal governance, the structure of the
academic career, modes of instruction, and academic "standards"
themselves, are all largely shaped (though again with exceptions)
more within the academy than by outside forces. And these internal
processes are, for better or worse, highly conservative, This is
in part because of how universities are governed, in part because
of the characteristics and orientations of academic men. Let us
look briefly at the latter.
Academic Orientations
How do academic men the rectors and professors and associate
professors, the docents and lecturers, who staff the old and the
new institutions of higher education in every advanced society
view the rapid developments occurring all around them? We do
not have a detailed study of the academic professions in most
countries that would allow us to say with precision just how these
men and women view their own institutions, students, and subjects,
and the great changes under way or just over the horizon.
But if we cannot know the distribution of academic attitudes
the relative size and strength of the several most important positions
that university teachers take toward growth and change in
their institutions we can identify the major dimensions along
which those attitudes divide.
The great changes in recent decades in the size and functions
of higher education have generated a diversity of orientations
within the academic profession in every advanced society. Until
after World Var IL the small university system in most countries
was staffed by professors and their assistants, men who had made
or were making their careers through a life of scholarship or scientific
research. The bulk of their students went into a small number
of professions traditionally linked to the university degree:
27
into higher secondary-school teaching, the civil service, into law,
medicine, and the church, and in some countries into certain
sectors of finance and industry. A small number of students stayed
on for higher degrees as apprentices to the professors in their
fields. The expansion and diversification, and partial democratization,
of higher education over the past two decades ha:, created
different functions for higher education, and in so doing has
brought different kinds of students to the universities. And, as I
have suggested earlier, within the university the old concensus
about the nature and proper functions of the university has broken
down; in every country academic men differ among themselves
in their attitudes toward changes in the university that are already
under way or are likely to accompany further growth.
At first glance, it may seem that the major division among
academic men is between those who give their approval and
support to the transformation of their institutions and systems as
they move from elite to mass higher education, with all the implications
for selection, curriculum, etc., that we've discussed
earlier, as opposed to those who tenaciously defend the forms
and functions of elite higher education. But in fact many academic
men (like politicians, civil servants, and ordinary people)
do not draw the full implications of growth nor see its logical
consequences, and many support the continued expansion of
higher education while opposing its transformation into mass
higher education. Others are wary of growth, while accepting and
even supporting important changes in the character of their institutions.
Thus we see that support among academics for substantial
expansion, beyond 15 to 20 percent of the age grade in higher
education, is to some degree independent of their attitudes toward
the fundamental changes in governance, curriculum, and the
like, that we associate with the movement toward mass higher
education.
I am suggesting that a useful analysis of the variations in perspective
and orientation among university teachers has to combine
their attitudes toward the expansion of higher education
with their views about its proper character and functions. Basic
differences in academic orientations are best represented not
along a single "traditionalist-expansionist" continuum, but more
accurately by a typology, one dimension of which is defined by
28
their opposition to or support for continued rapid expansion; the
other by a commitment to traditional university forms and functions
versus an acceptance of the transformation of the basic functions
and characteristics of the system as it moves from being an
elite to being a mass system. This typology is shown graphically
in Figute I.
FIGURE 1
Attitudes regarding the
proper forms and functions Attitudes toward the growth
of higher education of higher education
ELITISTS EXPANIONISTS
TradittonaItsts I II
Reformers HI IV
These stark polarities, of course, do not do justice to the complex
views and attitudes held by individual university teachers.
Nor do they capture the nuances of thought and feeling by which
men manage to maintain conceptions of the universities and of
their academic roles that reflect both expansionist and elitist
values, or that accept sonic changes but not others in the character
of their institutions. Nevertheless, men do differ in the emphasis
they place on these values, the priorities they put on their
embodiment in university organizations, and in the allocation of
both national and personal resources. And it is the relative emphasis
in their values and orientations that is crucial during a
period of expansion and change, when men can oppose, or attempt
to delay, or welcome, or even try to accelerate the changes
that are associated with the expansion and democratization of
higher education.
I. Thulitionalist-Elitist
This complex of values and attitudes was the dominant orientation
of European academic men (and indeed, of nearly everyone
who had views about universities) before World War II. And they
are still held by many university teachers, especially the senior
professors, in many countries. In their purest forms they rarely
are articulated or defended any longer in speech or print, but their
power lies in the extent to which they continue to guide action.
They are reflected most clearly in the work of senior academic
-29
men in their senates and committees, defending deeply held and
cherished values that for some represent the very essence of the
university, values that give meaning and substance to civilized
society. In this view, the function of higher education is to prepare
small numbers of very able and ambitious students who have
been rigorously educated in highly selective elite secondary
schools lycees or gymnasiums for the professions traditionally
requiring a university degree, and to prepare an even smaller
number for a life of scholarship and scientific research. This university
is defined by its traditional curriculum, and governed as
an autonomous corrorate body by senior professors. Graduates of
the university, whether they remain there as scholars or go into
the world in the learned professions, should hold a distinctive
status in society, and indeed comprise a special estate, marked
by a way of life and thought as well as by the dignities and privileges
of their status. This conception of the university has its roots
in the classical and humane studies of the medieval and post,
medieval universities, as modified and extended by the inclusion
of natural science in departments and research institutes during
the 19th century. But this orientation is compatible wib the "democratic"
view that entry to the university should be governed by
strictly meritocratic criteria rather than by social origins, and thus
in principle should be open to students from every social stratum,
though in practice the nature of selection and preparation for
entry effectively restricts membership almost wholly to the children
of the professional and upper-middle classes.
In an egalitarian age, men who hold these views are often
attacked as reactionary defenders of their own special privileges.
But in their own minds they are defending an important bulwark
of civilization against the new barbarism of mass society as they
defend the values of scholarship, learning, and disinterested inquiry
against the enormous pressures to subordinate the university
to the needs of vocational training, economic growth, social leveling,
and contemporary politics. It is an important question for
societies and educators whether these views and these men will
merely be defeated and "swept into the dustbin of history," or
whether their views will inform and fructify the developments
now occurring, and will survive in at least certain segments of the
diverse systems of higher education now emerging. The fate of
30
those values will be determined in part by the unique social and
political histories of the several societies whose educational systems
are now undergoing change, and in part by the ways in
which these changes are accomplished. It may be that the central
questions for educators in the near future will be not how to dislodge
elitist traditionalists from their positions of power in academic
senates, institutes, and departments, but how to preserve
and defend the best of the values that they represent under
conditions of mass higher education.
2. Traditionalist-Expansionist
Academic men holding this position have welcomed or at least
accepted the rapid growth of their institutions and systems, while
defending the traditional university values discussed above. In a
word, these are men who have believed it possible to expand very
considerably the elite university systems without transforming
them in fundamental ways or adding to them quite different kinds
of institutions it is a belief in the expansion rather than the
transformation of higher education. These views are perhaps the
most widely held of the four basic orientations we are describing.
Everywhere the pressures for expansion that followed World
War II met with surprisingly little resistance among academics,
in part because they recognized the changed economic and social
circumstances of the postwar world, in part because, in the short
run, expansion greatly increased their resources and their capacities
to do many things they had wanted to do, and in part because
their institutions showed a surprising capacity to carry larger
numbers of students and employ more staff without a fundamental
change in their character. But as I suggest elsewhere, growth
alone begins to create strains in the traditional forms and functions
of higher education, and this orientation, inherently unstable,
has no answers to the solution of the problems engendered
by growth, except more growth or the cessation of growth.
3. Elitist Reformers
This is a small but significant body of academic men who wish to
preserve the unique role of universities as elite centers for scholarship
and research at its highest level, but who recognize the
need for certain internal reforms that would reflect the changed
map of learning and the changing relationships between higher
-31
education and the larger society. Among the reforms these men
have urged have been a modification of the professorial oligarchy
that has governed most European universities and an improvement
in the status of junior staff in their conditions of work,
their tenure, and their role in departmental and university government.
In addition such men have also pressed for more support
for research and a movement away from the traditional faculty
toward a departmental organization that more closely reflected
the actual organization of intellectual and scientific work; in this
they were undoubtedly influenced by the American model in
which the department is the arm of the discipline in the university.
In a sense, this perspective aimed to modernize the university
in its organizational structure without changing its basic character
as the center for intellectual work at the highest standards, access
to which is limited by meritocratic criteria to a relatively small
number of able and highly motivated students. Many of these
men have learned in the past few decades how much easier it is
simply to increase the numbers of students and staff than to carry
out the serious structural reforms that they have recommended.
But in their view, a slowing down or even a cessation in the rate
of growth of higher education or the shifting of growth wholly to
the nonuniversity sectors may provide the breathing space and
opportunity to reform the conditions of teaching and yearning in
the universities, and thus afford an opportunity for reestablishing
and reinforcing those high standards threatened by the indiscriminate
growth of unreformed structures.
4. Expansionist Reformers
Expansionist reformers, concentrated very much on the political
left, and among younger faculty in the social sciences and some
of the arts subjects, see many of the traditional forms and functions
of the university as the greatest obstacle to the democratization
and expansion of higher education., The problem appears to
many of them as much political as educational: to change the distribution
of power within universities so as to break the capacity
for resistance of the more conservative professorial elite, In this
they often have the cooperation of political parties and movements,
and sometimes of higher civil servants in the relevant
ministries of education. The views of this body of thought are
marked by a conviction that there must be a substantial trans-
32
formation of higher education; it must be extended vertically
in the class structure fundamentally democratized in its patterns
of recruitment r. and also horizontally into a broad range
of social, economic, and political activities of the society. For
example, they want to provide useful training for a much wider
range of occupations and professions than the traditional learned
professions of the old university. Also, it is not uncommon for
people with these views to link the transformation of the university,
to broader ideas of social transformation or revolution, Moreover,
the proponents of this position do not ordinarily recommend
the creation of institutions to carry these additional functions
alongside the elite universities, but rather urge the transformation
of those elite universities into larger, more heterogeneous, more
democratic and socially responsive institutions of mass higher
education, And in many countries young faculty have found support
for their views in the student body; the main weight of student
demands for changes in the university fall into this category.
The attitudes and orientations of university teachers and administrators
toward the future of higher education in their countries,
summarized in this typology, both reflect and influence its
growth and development. Tl'e rapid growth of higher education
after World War II brought large numbers of new men into the
system. In the climate of Europe after World War II many of
these did not accept the old assumptions of European elite education,
especially its narrow class base for recruitment and the
"undemocratic" rule of the professiorate.
In addition, rapid growth, both in rate and absolute numbers,
weakened the close personal ties of junior and senior men that
had softened and legitimated the traditional arrangements. The
powerlessness and insecurity of the junior staff has become more
visible and more resented,
The broad-based demand for expansion set off a train of consequences,
most of which undermined the old assumptions and
arrangements and led to calls for further democratization and
reform. For example, higher education during the 1950s and 1960s
was increasingly justified by reference to its presumed contribution
to economic growth, and there was a strong emphasis on the
links between university training and industrial development. At
the same time that tendency created pressures for an expansion of
33
technological and business studies and for more directly applied
research in the universities. On the other hand, the g7'owing welfare
state created a continuing demand for people with skills in
the applied social sciences in public administration, in social
work, in penology indeed for the whole range of social problems
to which the state was giving increased and systematic attention.
Both of these broad developments strengthened certain
sections of the university and imbued them with a spirit inevitably
at variance with that of the traditional elite university.
Many of the problems of European higher education have centered
on the accommodation of these new functions and activities,
and the new kinds of people drawn to them and thus into the
university, with the older functions and traditional conceptions
of university life.
The typology of academic orientations sketched above, although
not meant to be descriptive of the full range of views held
by individual teachers and administrators, is designed to be helpful
in addressing such questions as these:
How diverse are the conceptions of academic life; are they captured
in this kind of typology, or are there better ways of describing
the main currents of thought among academic men about
their own institutions? And do wt: find the same types of attitudes
among politicians and civil servants or are differences among
them along different lines of cleavage?
What is the distribution of these types within a university, or a
national system, and how has that distribution been changing
over time?
What is the organizational structure of this normative diversity?
Do we find representatives of all' of these types within every
faculty, every department, in ways that are making it increasingly
difficult to govern these units and carry on the ordinary
business of education? Or do we find a continued consensus on
the conceptions of education within faculties and departments,
with the dissensus reflecting the new departments and faculties
and research institutes within the expanded universities and
thus somewhat insulated from one another in the ordinary running
of the institution?
Where are the concentrations of views held in terms of subject
areas, age, kind of institution, and the like? New "experimental"
institutions tend to recruit men interested in reform and expan-
34
sion initially. Do the new institutions have much higher corcen
trations of "expansionist reformers" or do they increasingly !lecome
"more royalist than the king," with strongly conservative
positions as a result of the insecurity of their status within their
national systems of higher education?
What are the patterns of coalition and conflict within the universities?
On what kinds of issues do men and groups holding one
or another of these different views join with others on such issues
as curriculum reform, and to what extent are lines of conflict and
cleavage drawn along these lines of academic orientations?
Briefly, we are asking whether this typology of academic orientations
helps to illuminate and clarify the dynamics of conflict and
change in the systems and institutions of higher education now,
and whether it aids us to study and understand the evolution of
these systems in the future? At the very least, if this typology
shows a certain congruence with the realities of institutional life,
it suggests that we need solid empirical data on the distributions
of these views in different systems and parts of systems. Broad
comparative survey research centering on a typology something
like this may allow us to get a better sense of the role of academic
attitudes and values in institutional change in European higher
education. For, whatever may be the best way to discuss and analyze
them, the distribution of attitudes and orientations of university
teachers and administrators about their own institutions is a
major force in determining whether a society moves toward mass
higher education, how it deals with the strains that inevitably
arise as it grows before it transforms its institutions, what forms
the new mass institutions take, and whether the older functions
and institutions survive and continue to perform their traditional
university functions.
Dilemmas of Growth in the Transition Toward
Mass Higher Education
The expansion of higher education and the transition of elite to
mass systems generate a set of dilemmas that are not easily solved,
but that persist as continuing problems for teachers, students, and
administrators. The forms these dilemmas take and their relative
importance vary from country to country, but in some form they
are visible in every advanced society whose systems of higher
education are growing.
a5
Quality, Equality and Expansion
The steady expansion of higher education appears to some
observers to constitute a serious threat to academic standards.
The question of "standards" is nominally a question of the quality
of an academic program, how rigorous and demanding on the one
hand, how eel' and stimulating on the other. At one extreme we
think of a group of learned and imaginative scholars teaching
highly selected and motivated students in a situation of rich Intellectual
resources, cultural, scientific and academic. At the other
extreme are institutions staffed by less well-educated and lessaccomplished
teachers, teaching less-able and less welt- motivated
students under less favorable conditions marked by lower salaries;
a poorer staff-student ratio, a smaller library, fewer laboratory
"places, and all in a less stimulating and lively intellectual
environment. Many countries are committed to the expansion of
their systems of higher education, but to an expansion which does
not lower the quality and standards of the higher education already
offered. This involves the achievement of education at a
high and common standard of quality throughout the system,
whatever the varied functions of the different institutions may be.
And this dual commitment to continued growth and also to
high quality in all parts of the system poses the dilemma.
The dilemma has three components. First, there is the strong
egalitarian sentiment that all provision in higher education ought
to be substantially of equal quality ( and thus of cost). ( In the
absence of good or reliable measures of the effects of higher education
on the adult careers of graduates, we tend to assess the
"quality" of education by reference to its internal procesSes, and
this leads us to equate quality with cost.) The second is that the
criteria against which new forms of mass higher education are
assessed are typically those of the older, costlier forms of elite
higher education. And third, a rapid and potentially almost unlimited
growth of higher. education, at the per capita cost levels
of the former small elite systems, places intolerable burdens on
national and state budgets that are also having to cope with
growing demands from other public agencies, such as social welfare,
preschool education and child care, primary and secondary
school systems, housing, transportation, and defense.
38
When applied to higher education, the egalitarian position,
which cuts across class lines and party preferences, is highly critical
of any tendency to institutionalize differences between one
sector and another of higher education. Egalitarians in many
countries are committed to closing the gulf between the several
parts of their higher educational systems, and to reducing the
differentials in the status, quality, costs and amenities of its different
segments and institutions. Men with these sentiments, who
might be called "unitarians" in their commitment to a single system
of institutions, governed by common standards of education
throughout, are often also committed to reforming universities
and making them serve more of the functions of the nonelite
forms of higher education, while at the same time raising the
quality of the nonelite forms of higher education, especially of
higher technical education, to that of the university standard.
(These are the people I have described earlier as "expansionist
reformers.") This position, liberal, humane, and generous, argues
that the formal differentiations between the different forms and
sectors of higher education almost always lead to invidious disstinctions
between them, and ultimately to very marked differences
in the quality of their staff and students, and in other
respects as well. Men holding these views also observe that the
weaker or low-status segments of the system are those characteristically
associated with and used by students from working and
lower middle-class origins, so that the status differentiation in
higher education is closely linked to that of the class structure as
a whole. They argue that any sectors of education outside the
system that includes the universities must necessarily be made
up of second-class institutions for second-class (and most commonly
working class) citizens, as historically they have been.
Essentially their slogan is "nothing if not the best" especially
for youngsters from those strata of the society that have often
gotten less or, if anything, second best.
But while this position is humane and generous in its concern
for the equality of educational opportunities lot .vnrking-class
people, it is, in its insistence on a "leveling upward," in cost as well
as quality, inevitably in conflict with a continued and rapid expansion
of the provision for higher education. No society, no matter
how rich, can afford a system of higher education for 20 or 30
37
percent of the age grade at the cost levels of the elite higher education
that it formerly provided for 5 percent of the population.
Insofar as egalitarians insist that there be no major differentials in
per capita costs among various sectors of the system of higher
education, and also insist on expansion, then they force a leveling
downward in costs, and perhaps in quality as well. Insofar as they
are committed to a high and common set of standards throughout
the system, they are also necessarily urging a restraint on expansion,
though they themselves may not recognize this. The crucial
question in this "unitarian" position is whether it is a commitment
only to a common set of standards throughout the system, or to a
common high set of standards as well.
The "unitarian" position, I suggest, is basically incompatible
with very marked differences between institutions in their status,
staff-student ratios, and other aspects of cost and quality. 'While
it is possible in principle to argue that some institutions would be
more expensive because they carry a larger research responsibility,
it is very difficult in practice to argue for a genuine unitarian
system while forbidding certain parts of that system or institutions
within it to engage in research. And research is inherently highly
expensive. Moreover, there is a tendency everywhere to identify
research with the highest standards of higher education, an identification
that has a strong component of reality in it. It is research
that attracts the most able and creative academic minds, and it is
the institutions that recruit these men that gain higher status in
any system of higher education. Therefore, a genuinely egalitarian
policy muse allow every institution to attract people who are innovative
intellectually, and that means supporting their research
and giving them the high degree of autonomy they need to create
new knowledge, new fields of study, and new combinations of
disciplines. These activities are very hard to rationalize and prograin
closely despite the new forms of systems management being
introduced everywhere. For this and other reasons, a unitarian
position that wants to raise standards in all institutions to that of
the leading universities, tends to constrain the growth of the system;
if every new place, every new institution is potentially as
expensive as the most costly of the old, then growth must be very
carefully planned and sharply restricted. However, where the
egalitarian spirit overrides that of a commitment to high stand-
ards, as in much of the United States, the slogan is not "nothing if
not the best" but rather the expansionist slogan "something is
better than nothing," Under those circumstances there tends to
be a leveling downward coupled with expansion, rather than a
leveling upward with its inherent tendencies toward a constraint
on growth,
The key question in this dilemma is whether new forms of
higher education can fulfill their functions at a standard that earns
high status and satisfies egalitarians, while reducing per capita
costs in ways that will allow genuine expansion toward mass
higher education. The Open University in Great Britain is certainly
one effort in that direction, Alternatively, a society may
reject the arguments of the unitarians and egalitarians and develop
a system that sustains internal diversity in costs and quality
as well as in forms and functions, on the American model. (As I
suggest later, this Is much more difficult in systems that are
financed, and thus ultimately governed, from a central government
agency,) But in either case, the more ambitious and energetic
the new institutions are, the more they will demand the libraries
and research facilities, the salary schedules and the other
amenities, of the old institutions, and the more likely, they are to
drive their per capita costs up. It may be worth exploring how
the forms of this dilemma differ in different societies.
The effect of expansion on "standards" and "quality" is a complex
and uncertain issue. In the early stages of the current phase
of growth, in the 1950s, there was widespread concern among
academic men and others that the pool of talented youth able to
profit from higher education was small and limited, and that
expansion beyond the numbers provided by this pool would necessarily
mean a decline in student quality. But this fear has
declined and in some cases disappeared as numbers have grown
without a demonstrable decline in overall student quality.° Nevertheless,
some observers suggest the new students are, if not less
able, then less highly motivated, or less well prepared in their secondary
schools, for serious academic work. This feeling is widespread,
even if there is no good evidence to support the hypothesis,
and some reason to suspect that real students in the present
9Though it appears that with larger numbers the range of student abilities
is wider.
39
are being compared with idealized students in some mythical
Golden Age located variously in the past, depending on the age
of the speaker.
There is a somewhat more persistent and plausible concern
held by many that the rapid expansion of higher education has
lowered the average quality or the adequacy of preparation of
college and university teachers, especially among the new recruits.
Still others fear that growth has affected the relations
between teachers and students adversely, making them more
remote and impersonal (where they were not so already). And
others suggest that mass higher education must affect the intellectual
climate of colleges and universities, introducing into them
the vulgarities of the marketplace, of vocational training, of mass
politics and popular culture.
Whatever the validity of these fears, and they are not wholly
without substance, it seems likely that the impact of expansion on
the quality of higher education would be greatly influenced in
every society by how it deals with the dilemmas discussed above,
and particularly whether it strives to achieve a common level of
quality throughout, or finds ways of creating and sustaining diversity
within its system in all.the characteristics that mark higher
educational institutions, including their quality and costs. It may
be that in the interaction of quality, equality, and expansion, educators
must accept the inequalities inherent in genuine diversity if
they are to defend the highest standards of scholarly and academic
life in some parts of an expanding system. But that "solution,"
of course, has its own costs moral and intellectual as well
as financial and political and some societies may well opt for
equality at high standards at the cost of continued rapid expansion.
But I suspect that only in rhetoric can all of these desirable
characteristics of higher education be maximized within the same
system.
Patterns of Planning under Conditions of
Uncertainty and Rapid Change
An analysis of the phases of development of higher education of
the kind we are undertaking in this paper involves some effort to
see ahead into the future. And that, of course, raises the question
of the extent to which some kind of planning, either for systems
40--
or for single institutions, can help to ease the transitions and solve
the problems during the transition phases uncovered by this analysis.
That, in turn, involves some consideration of the nature of
forecasting and the role that it may play in educational planning.
Let me start by making a distinction between secular trends and
unforeseen developments.
Secular Trends
Secular trends, the broad movements of social institutions of the
kind that we have been discussing in this paper, can reasonably
be expected to continue short of a catastrophe over a period of
decades. Among the secular trends in higher education that we
can reasonably expect to continue for the rest of the century the
most important are growth, democratization, and diversification.
Growth
Despite the problems that the growth of higher education
brings in its train and despite the arguments one hears from various
quarters that the growth should be slowed or stopped, it seems
to me very unlikely that any advanced industrial society can or
will be able to stabilize the numbers going on to some form of
higher education any time in the near future. And this is true for
a number of reasons that I think will be compelling for any
government or ministry.
1. There is almost certainly going to be a continued popular
demand for an increase in the number of places in colleges and
universities. Despite much loose talk about graduate unemployment
or of an oversupply of educated men, it is still clear that
people who have gone on to higher education thereby increase
their chances for having more secure, more interesting, and better
paid work throughout their lives. The concern of young men and
women and of their parents for access to the best and most highly
rewarding jobs in the society (rewarding in every sense) will
insure that the demand for places continues high.
2. These rational calculations and anticipations initially affect
those people (and their sons and daughters) who are, so to speak,
at the margin of higher education, who would a few years earlier
have ended their formal education on the completion of secondary
schooling. But growth and the movement from elite to mass
higher education itself creates a set of social and psychological
-41
forces that tend to sustain it. As more and more people go to college
or university, and as an even larger number become aware
of it as a possible and reasonable aspiration for themselves and
their children, higher education enters into the standard of living
of growing sectors of the population. Sending one's sons and
daughters to college or university increasingly becomes one of the
decencies of life rather than an extraordinary privilege reserved
for people of high status or extraordinary ability. Giving one's
children a higher education begins to resemble the acquisition of
an automobile or washing machine, one of the symbols of increasing
affluence and there can be little doubt that the populations
of advanced industrial societies have the settled expectation of
rising standard of living. But in addition, sending one's sons and
daughters to college or university is already, and will increasingly
be, a symbol of rising social status. Not only does it give evidence
of status mobility in the adult generation in this respect resembling
the purchase of a home in the country or an automobile --
but it also lays the necessary foundation for the social mobility of
a family across generations. Everywhere the numbers of people
who have completed secondary education grows, and as more
people complete secondary education, it will be more necessary
for their sons and daughters to go on to higher education if they
are to qualify for still higher status occupations. And this is increasingly
the case as more and more occupations require a
degree or other higher educational qualification for entry.
3. But of course the wishes of parents and youngsters to go on
to higher education would be inhibited if there were no growth
in the jobs that "require" postsecondary education. And on this
score, there is presently much talk of an oversupply of graduates
and of a decline in the market for people who have had further
education. But I think there is little evidence for that oversupply,
certainly over the next three or four decades. For closely related
to the growth of demand for places, which might be called the
push from the general population, there is the pull of the economy,
marked particularly by the continued growth of the tertiary
or service sector of the society. And this takes two forms. One is
the growth of those occupations that traditionally or presently
"require" higher educational qualifications. The growth of every
advanced economy is marked by a much more rapid growth in
the numbers of managerial and technical personnel than of manual
or skilled workers. The rationalization of production and the
growth of industrial and commercial organizations generate enormous
bureaucratic structures that in their middle and higher
reaches clearly call for the skills and attitudes and orientations
that are provided by postsecondary education. Moreover, there
is a whole range of new professions and semiprofessions, particu.
larly those linked to the welfare functions of government the
social workers, penologists, experts in the environment, transport,
housing and urban problems that call for advanced training.
But in addition, and equally important, is the educational
inflation of occupations. As the supply of educated people grows,
job requirements are redefined so that occupations that formerly
were filled by secondary-school graduates are increasingly restricted
to people with postsecondary education. But in fact,
people with more formal education compete with growing success
for those jobs with people who have less formal qualificatiOn.
And once in those jobs, they tend to reshape them, by exercising
responsibility, taking initiative, applying skill and imagination, in
ways that the job may not have "required" when it was being
filled by people with lower qualifications. This is an aspect of the
impact of the extension of higher education on the occupational
structure that manpower analysts almost never take into account,
partly because until recently graduates have been going into
traditional graduate occupations rather than redefining and reshaping
jobs formerly filled by people who had not been to college
or university. But one of the most important aspects of the
movement front elite to mass higher education lies precisely in
this transformation of jobs by people of greater education than
formerly were employed in those jobs,
What mass higher education does is to break the old rigid
connection between education and the occupational structure
under which a degree not only qualified men for a certain range
of occupations and professions, but also disqualified them for all
the jobs that formerly did not employ graduates. Thus "graduate
unemployment" has never meant that graduates could not get
jobs competitively with nongraduates, but that they could not
get the kind of jobs that they thought appropriate to their status
and dignity. The growth of mass higher education breaks this con-
-43
nection, and allows people who have gained a higher education
to seek employment without loss of dignity wherever the jobs may
exist. By entering the job market without prior conceptions of
"inappropriate" jobs, graduates can up-grade the jobs that they
do take, both in status and in the scope they give for the application
of skill and initiative. At the same time, by competing with
those who have not been through college or university they increase
the pressures on the latter to gain formal qualifications so
that they too can compete successfully for the same range of
white-collar occupations. And that process (like the rising standards
of living as applied to formal education) Is one of the processes
that inexorably increases the demand for higher education
both from the populations of industrial societies and from their
occupational structures.
4. Alongside these social, psychological, and economic forces
are the institutional changes in secondary education that bring
more and more students to.the point of college or university entry.
The raising of the school-leaving age, the broad extension of university
preparatory studies, the spread of comprehensive schooling,
are all institutional encouragements to students to stay on
longer and to qualify for entry to college or university. The extension
of educational opportunities in secondary education reflects
both the fundamental democratization of modern society and also
changes in the economy that I have spoken of. But it works Independently
of these other forces to increase the pool of young men
and women "at the margin" of higher education, and thus inevitably
the absolute numbers and the proportion of the age grade
who are able to go on in response to a variety of other economic
and social motivations.
It is widely recognized that the rate of social, economic and
technological chani&in modern societies is very high and increasing.
Inventions such as the computer, changes in the supply of
'energy implicit in nuclear fission and fusion, changes in forms of
transportation and entertainment and communication all create
new industries almost overnight while sentencing others to rapid
decay and obsolescence. The more highly developed the economy,
the more rapid these transformations of the economy and its
underlying technological base, and all of this in turn forces
changes throughout life on people in the labor force. One student
44
of social and technological change has estimated that a man who
is presently entering the labor market in the United States will
change not just his job but the industry in which he works nine
or ten times in the course of his working life.
The rapidity of social change, largely though not exclusively
due to rapid technological change, puts a very great premium on
the ability to learn over the mastery of specific skills. This in turn
greatly increases the functional importance of formal schooling
over apprenticeship or on-the-job training. Formal education provides
a base of broad understanding of managerial and technical
principles, and above all a training in the capacity to acquire new
knowledge, while apprenticeship and on-the-job training more
often transmit skills that are likely to become obsolete very
shortly. Rapid technological and organizational change loosen the
links between formal education and specific parts of the occupational
structure; but they increase the role of formal schooling in
underpinning the whole structure of a rapidly changing technological
system. This fact argues against the widespread assumption
that "nontechnical" studies have no vocational component.
On the contrary, it is likely that the most important "skill" acquired
in higher education is the capacity to respond sensitively
and successfully to rapid social and technological change. Above
any specific skill acquired, this adaptability gives students in colleges
and universities significant advantage over those who have
not received any higher education. Indeed, it may well be that
formal education is the major determinant of whether men and
women are the beneficiaries or the victims of social and economic
changes. It is clear that these changes benefit some sections of the
population while hurting others, and those hurt most are those
with inflexible skills who have not the capacity to adapt readily to
new requirements or opportunities. It is not only the ability to
adapt to new jobs but the capacity to learn where new opportunities
are arising that is the mark of the educated man, and this is
a very great advantage that he has over less well-educated people
in contemporary societies.
Democratization
One secular trend in modern times a movement that in Western
countries is unbroken for at least two centuries and shows no signs
-45
of weakening is the fundamental democratization of society.
In its earliest forms this involved the extension of the franchise
and other aspects of political power to larger and larger sections
of the society. In addition there has been a continued weakening
of traditional social distinctions, and the extension of various social
and economic rights (which were once privileges) to ever broader
sections of the community. Traditional social hierarchies still survive,
and patterns of deference are deeply imbedded in the social
structures of many societies. Nevertheless, everywhere in the
West they are weakening under the impact of World Wars, the
growth of the consuming society, and the leveling forces of democratic
politics, the mass media, and mass education. The movement
toward mass higher education will contribute to this fundamental
democratization of society, but also the democratization
of society will feed back upon and contribute to the extension of
educational opportunities. But the expansion and democratization
of educational opportunity, the opening of doors, so to speak, is
only part of this process. Sooner or later the argument is made
that the ultimate results of a policy of equality of opportunity
must be visible in the equality of achievement of social groups
and strata. If intelligence is randomly distributed in a population
an empirical question that has come to be a political affirmation
then any differences in the proportions of youth from different
social groups or strata who enter higher education and gain its
degrees and certificates must be due to patterns of social discrimination
and not to variations in individual ability. These differences
in an egalitarian age are increasingly defined as inequities
and the product of injustice, and very strong social and political
forces are at work to reduce or obliterate them. The net result of
these forces must be the expansion of places, if the proportions
from every social class are to be equalized. This is clearly more a
long-range goal than any immediate achievable outcome of public
policy; and moreover there are many arguments in principle
against these policies. But whatever, one may think of those argu-.
ments, it is difficult to imagine that they will be decisive, and that
the fundamental democratization of the society will not also extend
to the provision of places in higher education as it has for
primary school and is in the process of doing at the secondary
levels.
413
Diversification
Another broad trend in higher education that we might reasonably
expect to continue is the diversification of the forms and
functions of higher education. As I have suggested several times
in this essay, the growth of numbers has also meant an increasing
diversity of students in respect to their social origins and other
characteristics, in their motivations, aspirations, interests, and
adult careers. All of this places great pressures on the system to
reflect the diversity of students in a similar diversity of educational
provision in the curriculum, in forms of instruction and
the like. A central issue, as I have suggested, is the continuing
struggle on the part of more traditionally oriented educations
against the threat, as they see it, to standards, values, and indeed
the very essence of the traditional university, posed by the pressures
for diversification arising out of the growing and changing
student population.
But in addition to the familiar changes within the "regular"
colleges and universities, there is also a movement to diversify
higher education upward and outward: upward to provide adult
education or lifelong learning for a very large part of the adult
population; outward, to bring it to people in their own homes or
workplaces. The pressures behind this are many, There is obviously
the force of rapid social and technological change, which
alone creates a need for the provision of new skills or renewed
formal training for people who are changing their occupations,
or whose jobs and professions are changing more rapidly than
their capacity to keep up through on-the-job experience. For
example, engineers and doctors are increasingly out of touch with
the latest developments in their professions unless they are able
to get formal refresher training during their professional careers.
But in addition many educators ate noting that substantial sections
of the old university student body, entering directly from
secondary school, are for various reasons somewhat resentful of
their prolonged formal education and rather weakly motivated.
By contrast the motivation of adults already in the occupational
structure for further formal education is often very high. They
are much more rewarding to teach and indeed bring a new and
stimulating element back into the classroom by way of their own
job experience. Also, they tend to be less highly politicized
47
and have a more exclusively academic or vocational interest, and
this appeals to many educators as well as to politicians. Add to
this the fact that adult education, offered part-time or in the evenings
for people already in the occupational structure, often turns
out to be less expensive than traditional forms of higher education.
The students do not have to be expensively maintained in
halls of residence; moreover, there is not the hidden cost of their
foregone earnings If they are actually at work while attending
college or university courses. A great deal has been written on
the subject of permanent education; I share the view of many that
this may well be the most rapidly growing sector of higher education
over the next three or four decades. And if adults are
brought directly into the central college and university facilities
and are taught alongside of young men and women directly out
of secondary school, it may be enormously beneficial for both
sides, and in important respects change the character of higher
education for the older and younger groups alike.
But adult education, already liberated from the traditional
forms associated with the education of young men and women, is
likely to break with all sorts of traditional assumptions about how
higher education is accomplished. It is likely to be more dispersed
and brought much closer to where people live and work. Already
the Open University in Britain has demonstrated that higher
education at the high standard of British universities can be offered
to men and women in their own homes, and this is a lesson
that is being learned by similar forms of off-campus and "extended"
education in the United States and other countries. The
imaginative use of television, video cassettes, and remote computer
consoles will greatly facilitate the provision of higher education
outside the traditional boundaries of the university or college
buildings. Although these developments are likely to occur
first in connection with adult education, they may very well be
adapted to the education of postsecondary youth in the near
future.
Growth, democratization, diversification these are the secular
trends in higher education that we can anticipate continuing,
though at different rates and in different forms in different places,
over the next three or four decades. And if the future were the
product of the secular trends alone we could plan for it with some
48
assurance, sonic sense of our capacity to master the future, first
intellectually and then institutionally. But the future is not just
the aggregate of secular trends. It is also full of unforeseen events
and developments that sharply limit our power to anticipate the
nature of the world for which we plan, or our capacity to make
our plans achieve the results that we intend.
Unforeseen Developments
Unforeseen developments take a number of different forms. They
take the form of new techniques and technologies in industries;
they take the form of broad changes in the values of sections of
the society and most especially of youth, Who could have forecast
only two or three decades ago the development of the computer
industry, or of electronics more generally? These industries
have affected the economies and occupational structures of advanced
industrial societies very considerably. And in a narrower
perspective, they have greatly changed the resources available to
education. Video cassettes, television, computers and the like
make it possible at least to imagine extended forms of higher education
very different from the correspondence courses of the "external
degree" before World War
Specific historical events also affect our power to forecast the
developments of institutions. The assassinations of John and Robert
Kennedy profoundly changed the politics (and the colleges
and universities) of the United States, not least through their
effect on the extent and duration of American military involvement
in Indo-China. The balance of payments crisis in Britain
and its effect on the British National Plan in the late 1960s very
substantially modified the development of higher education in
that country. Or to take a more speculative example, a substantial
easing of tensions between East and West, and very sharp
control of the arms race, may in the future release substantial
resources in Western countries for higher education that are now
spent on defense.
There are also broad changes in values, in whole societies or
in major segments, that affect higher education. For example, the
quite unanticipated growth of concern for the environment in all
industrial societies will affect higher education in various ways
on one hand, increasing the demand for people with broad corn-
49
hinations of advanced learning in social and technical areas; on
the other hand, providing important additional competition for
resources that might otherwise go to higher education. Another
example is the growth of the "counterculture" in every Western
society, and what is clearly a retreat from reason among sections
of middle-class youth toward neo-romanticism and unconventional
forms of religiosity. Closely related to this there is, among
certain sections of youth, what might be called a crisis of ambitiOn,
marked by the primacy of moral considerations and a "quest
for community," as over against the striving for individual achievement
and a personal career. These changes in values, whose significance
it is hard now to assess over the long run, may have
very large consequences for institutions such as universities based
so substantially on the rule of reason and on the preparation for
adult careers based on knowledge and expertise. The heightened
political concerns of university students in the late 1960s, and
the readiness to carry political activism into the university itself,
has posed another set of problems for institutions of higher education,
and it is difficult to know how that pattern will develop in
the decades ahead. In addition there are changes in the relations
between the generations, in the -strength and basis of authority,
and in a whole variety of fundamental beliefs and values that
make problematic the traditional forms of relationships in colleges
and universities.
Forms of "Planning"
In the face of so much that is so problematic and fort itous in
historical development, as against what is reasonably anticipatable
as the outcome of foreseeable secular change, it is useful to
make a distinction between what might be called "prescriptive
planning" and "systems planning."
Prescriptive planning, the kind that is most commonly practiced
by the governing agencies and ministries of advanced societies,
aims to spell out in detail the size and shape of the system
of higher education over the next several decades, and the content
and forms of instruction: in brief, what will be taught, to whom,
to how many, and in what kind of institutions at what expense.
Prescriptive planning necessarily rests on an analysis of secular
trends (and only some of those). Typically, it bases itself on
50
estimates and projections of the demand for higher education,
both by the population at large and by the economy, and the
resources available to higher education over a period of years.
Systems planning, by contrast, would have as its aim the evolution
of a system of higher education marked by diversity and flexibility.
It would not aim to specify in detail what those institutions
of higher education will look like, or how and what they will
teach to whom. The difference in these modes of "planning" is
between planning the specific size, shape, and content of an educational
system, and planning the structure or form of a system
of higher education that is best able to respond to the combination
of secular trends and unforeseen developments.
The forces for prescriptive planning are everywhere dominant,
despite the fact that they are probably inappropriate for a
future that inevitably involves unforeseen developments. They
are dominant, first, because of the very existence of agencies of
central control. The existence of a central state administrative
apparatus with the power to plan prescriptively is the first guarantee
that that will be the form that planning will take. There is,
in addition, the illusion that higher education constitutes a closed
system relatively impervious to unforeseen developments. This is
a hangover from the period when almost the whole of education
consisted of compulsory schooling plus a very small system of
elite higher education; the bulk of "planning" for that kind of
system was largely a planning for space and for the number of
teachers necessary for a known population of youngsters. The
forms and patterns of broad, nationwide prescriptive planning
for primary and secondary education are now being adapted to
higher education. Yet it is easy to see how much more vulnerable
higher education is to unforeseen developments in technology,
historical events, and broad changes in values than is the system
of primary and secondary education. And third, growth itself stimulates
prescriptive planning: the more higher education grows, the
more money is needed for it, the more interest there is in it among
larger parts of the population, the greater demand there is for
tight control over its shape and costs. The growing demand for
"accountability" of higher education, for its ability to demonstrate
its efficiency in the achievement of mandated and budgeted goals,
inevitably translates itself into tighter controls and prescriptive
51
planning. But this control can only be exercised rationally in
terms of available knowledge, based on foreseeable trends and
protections. The growth of higher education, given a prescriptive
control system, places ever greater demands on that system to
maintain and increase its control over numbers and costs, structures
and standards.
But prescriptive planning involving that kind of close control
has very little flexibility to respond to the unforeseen, and a very
slow response rate to new developments. In addition it politcizes
many educational issues by locating the key decisions in central
political agencies. But perhaps most importantly, prescriptive
planning by central planning agencies does not and perhaps cannot
create genuine diversity in the forms and structures of higher
education, although diversity itself constitutes the major resource
that higher education has for responding to the unforeseen as
well as to the anticipated developments and secular trends of
modern society.
Central governing bodies tend to exert pressures toward uniformity
among the institutions under their control. And these
tendencies are only slowed rather than reversed by the formal
allocation of different functions to different sectors, as they are,
for example, in Britain's "binary" system. The pressures for uniformity
or convergence associated with central governmental control
over higher education, are several:
The uniform application of administrative forms and principles,
as in formulas linking support to enrollments; formulas governing
building standards and the provision and allocation of space;
formulas governing research support, etc.
Broad norms of equity, which prescribe equal treatment for
"equivalent" units under a single governing body;
Increasingly strong egalitarian values, which define all differences
among public institutions in their functions, standards, and
support as inequitable.
Add to these the tendency for institutions to converge toward
the forms and practices of the most prestigious models of higher
education, a tendancy that operates independently of government
52 --
control, and we see that the forces working against diversity in
higher education are very strong at a time when expansion increases
the needs for diversification of forms and functions beyond
what presently exists.
In many countries the struggle to contain diversity takes the
form of an effort to maintain tight controls over standards, costs,
functions, forms, and so forth, all in the service of the traditional
values of higher education. Diversity is seen not only as a threat
to the power of the state over a major claimant on public resources,
as a threat to orderly governmental and bureaucratic
process, as a challenge to the norms of equity and equality; diversity
is also seen as academic anarchy and a threat to the traditional
values of higher education itself. In part, there is in this a
hostility to the market that is seen, correctly, as subversive of
prescriptive controls, embodying the mastery of the unqualified
over what ought to be a protected sphere of cultural life. Add to
this the relation of growth to high costs and public accountability,
and the consequent rationalization of administration in the Nice
of efficiency, and we see how strong are the forces making for
prescriptive planning. Everywhere one sees the distaste of central
governmental agencies for the messiness and unpredictability of
genuine and evolving diversity, and their continued efforts to
bring their systems back under control and along desired lines of
development. One may ask whether that tendency, which emerges
more strongly during the confusions and uncertainties of transition
from elite to mass higher education, is in fact likely to produce
the kind of diverse system appropriate to mass higher
education.
There are counter forces that help to sustain and even increase
diversity in higher education (and these, of course, vary in
strength in different countries). In some places there is a multiplicity
of governmental bodies involved in higher education: the
United States is an extreme case in this respect. More generally,
there are variations in the degree of diversity of sources of support,
both of public and private funds. Third, there is, among
some politicians and educators, a growing recognition of the desirability
of diversity of forms and functions in higher education,
and this leads to efforts to create and defend these institutional
53
differences, through legislative and budgetary means." In addition
there is a growing sense of the inadequacy of the existing
educational forms and a growing readiness to provide support for
educational "innovations" on every level of higher education. PerImps
most important, rapid growth and large size make it more
difficult for governing agencies to impose uniform patterns in
systems already very large and diverse. The growth of institutions
and systems toward mass higher education puts a strain on administrative
structures designed for a smaller, simpler, elite system,
and activities begin to elude the controls of an overburdened
and understaffed administration. And finally, whether or not it is
desirable, it is difficult to rationalize the multiplicity of functions
and activities that go on within higher education. Much of what
is done in higher education is esoteric and hard to understand for
anyone outside a narrow academic or professional specialty. This
near monopoly within the academic world of specialized knowledge
about the nature of the academic fields and their needs and
requirements is the ultimate basis of academic autonomy, and
slows ( though it may not prevent) rationalization and the application
of standardized formulas governing admissions, academic
standards, support, workloads; -etc. (This is, of course, the more
true where the knowledge base is greater and the intellectual
authority of the academics concerned is higher which is why
academic autonomy is defended more successfully in elite
institutions. )
The multiplicity of academic activities, and the specialized
knowledge required to assess or evaluate them, interferes also
with the flow of accurate and standardized information about
what is going on in an institution to its top management, and even
more to higher governmental agencies and authorities. The resulting
areas of ignorance and obscurity make it more difficult to
develop standardized procedures and formulas, and thus sustain
diversities.
loThis effort to achieve diversity through prescriptive planning runs
against the political forces of equality, the bureaucratic preferences for
standardization, and the academic tendency of institutions to model themselves
on the most prestigious. This is an intent of the "binary" policy in
Britain. For a discussion of its recent problems, see the comments of its
author, Anthony Crosland, in the Times Higher Educational Supplement,
June 6, 1972.
Systems planning, by contrast, would aim to strengthen the
forces making for diversity in higher education. It would, for
example, increase the range and diversity of governing agencies
and sources of support; it would encourage an increase in the
range of functions performed and constituencies served by the
system ( though not necessarily by an individual institution); it
would create forms of budgetary control in the service of "accountability"
that did not impose the same formulas, standards, or
criteria of "efficient performance" on all parts of the system. It
would, in the terms of this essay, defend elite institutions in an
emerging system of mass higher education without allowing the
old elite institutions to impose their forms, standards, and costs
on the new institutions or on the system as a whole.
But planning for a system marked by diversity runs against
the habits and structures of educational planning in most European
countries. Planning for diversity clearly involves risks,
whereas prescriptive planning gives the illusion of meeting a contingent
future more effectively (though I suspect the reverse is
true). Prescriptive planning, and the central administrative and
control structures that make it possible, are, I have suggested, the
enemies of diversity, because diversity makes prescriptive planning
and control more difficult and because it violates the principles
of equitable treatment by government agencies and equality
of status of public institutions. For these and other reasons, it
it seems unlikely that those governmental agencies that have the
responsibility for higher education can or will surrender their
control.
Thus, on balance, I believe that the forces working against
genuine diversity in higher education in most European countries
are rather stronger than those working to sustain or increase it.
This may be debatable, in which case it is an issue that deserves
further comparative study. But if that assumption is true, then
several questions deserve close attention.
I. Is increasing control over the forms and functions of higher
education by central public agencies or authorities an inevitable
concommitant of expansion and increased costs?
2. Is the (increasing) role of public authorities presently a
force working against diversity in higher education, in their functions
and standards, their modes of governance, their forms of
_55
instruction, their sources of support, and their relation to other
institutions of society?
3. If so, are these "standardizing" tendencies inherent in central
governmental control, or is it possible for central governing
and financing agencies to function in ways that sustain and increase
the diversity in higher education? If so, what governing
and funding structures would have that effect, and what principles
of operation would govern their activities? Ilow can efforts to
support diversity be sustained against the political pressures in
almost all advanced industrial societies arising out of (a) the
norms that prescribe equitable treatment of all comparable units
and (b) growing egalitarian sentiments and policies?
Conclusion
It is, needless to say, impossible to say anything very specific that
is broadly true of all the emerging forms of higher education in
15 or 20 complex industrial societies. Therefore, to say anything
that might be useful, or at least interesting, it is necessary to carry
on the discussion at a somewhat higher level of abstraction. But
this means, as I have suggested earlier, that my remarks cannot
be true in detail for any institution or even any single national
system.
Moreover, this paper is not intended to increase or disseminate
knowledge, in the way, for example, that a statistical report
or a comparative survey of some emerging educational patterns
does. It is rather an effort to suggest a way of thinking about
the development of higher education in advanced societies, and
to provide a way of framing a set of interrelated questions about
this development. Many of my apparently confident assertions
will be challenged, and some may in fact be empirically wrong,
at least in some places. But that is less important than whether
the questions thus raised, the problems and issues thus identified,
are in fact the problems, issues, and dilemmas of higher education
that educators and politicians, students and citizens, face in societies
whose systems of higher education are moving from elite to
mass forms. My aim was to help identify and clarify those questions,
not to answer them. In keeping with my evident bias in
favor of diversity, I can only hope that even if the questions that
higher education in advanced societies face are similar, their answers
will be different.
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Toward a Learning Society: Alternative Channels to Life, Work, and Service ($2.95)
Priorities for Action: Final Report of the Carnegie Commission (Hardback $10.00;
Paperback $4.50; Paperback without technical notes $1.95)
College Graduates and Jobs: Adjusting to a New Labor Market Situation 10001-6
($4.50)
Governance of Higher Education: Six Priority Problems - 10062 -4 ($4.50)
Purposes and Performance of Higher Education in the United States 100714 ($2.45)
Campus and the City: Maximizing Assets and Reducing Liabilities 10058.8 ($1.95)
The Fourth Revolution: Instructional Technology in Higher Education- 10050 -0 ($1.95)
More Effective Use of Resources: An Imperative for Higher Education-10051-9 ($3 95)
Reform on Campus: Changing Students, Changing Academic Programs-10052-7 ($2 95)
Institutional Aid: Federal Support to Colleges and Universities 10043-8 ($4.95)
New Students and New Places: Policies for the Future Growth and Development of
Higher Education 10038 ($3.50)
Dissent and Disruption: Proposals for Consideration by the Campus 10031 ($4.95)
The Capitol and the Campus: State Responsibility for Postsecondary Education 10025
($2,95)
From Isolation to Mainstream: Problems of the Colleges Founded for Negroes 10028
($1.95)
Less Time, More Options: Education Beyond the High School 10020 ($L95)
Higher Education and the Nation's Health: Policies for Medical and Dental Education
10021 ($2.95)
The Open-Door Colleges: Policies for Community Colleges 10019 ($1.95)
Quality and Equality: New Levels of Federal Responsibility for Higher Education (Includes
Quality and Equality: Revised Recommendations) 10002 & 10018 (01.95)
A Chance to Learn: An Action Agenda for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education
10011 ($1.95)