Transforming Higher Education: A Comparative Study

Citation

Coates, H. (2008), "Transforming Higher Education: A Comparative Study", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 98-100. https://doi.org/10.1108/09684880810848431

The second edition of Transforming Higher Education: A Comparative Study represents approaches and insights from a comparative study, first published in 2000, of broad patterns in system‐level reforms in higher education between the 1970s and 1990s. The text synthesises a range of analytical and empirical analyses into a perspective on higher education policy and practice in Sweden, Norway and England. It examines how interactions between commercial, collegial and governmental forces have shaped change in policy thinking and institutional management and academic practice.

The book contains eight chapters, each of which is written by one or two authors. The first chapter positions the analysis and is largely methodology in nature. Chapter two offers an historical overview of higher education in the period under study in the three European countries. The third chapter reviews policy approaches, including policy designs, regimes and instruments. Chapter five completes the review undertaken in the second to fifth chapters of the histories, policies and structures of higher education with a normative analysis of organisational characteristics of higher education providers. The final three chapters focus on academic work and conclusions, in particular the intersection between academics and policy, the identity of academics, and key perspectives and themes in the text.

The book offers a detailed insight into the thinking of higher education policy researchers. It documents in a scholarly way how higher education researchers think about the complex intersections between policy, institutional management and educational provision. These lines are not linear but synthetic. The writing captures them well, and in doing so conveys a sense of developmental thinking about universities in the last few decades of the twentieth century.

Chapter six by Roar Høstaker illustrates the book's approach. This chapter considers the influence of policy changes on the academic profession in the three countries. Through this, it generates broader considerations about the nature of the academic profession itself.

Høstaker's analysis begins by considering the status of the academic profession before the early 1980s. While faculty work in the UK was shaped by the Oxbridge model, academics in Norway and Sweden had closer ties with civil service. Systemic growth led to various forms of homogenisation and status equalisation.

System‐level reforms in the early 1980s in the UK led to growth in student numbers and informal institutional stratification via the research assessment exercise. Reforms in Sweden concentrated on reducing centralised governance, enhancing quality assurance and increasing access. Norwegian reforms followed a similar pattern to those in Sweden, but with less emphasis on reducing centralisation.

Various consequences for the academic profession are traced. Høstaker considers how reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to a revision of academic hierarchies, to divisions between the disciplines and new approaches to becoming an academic. Subtle but interesting differences are traced between the countries, and are linked with structural changes in the growth, differentiation and standardisation of the academic profession between the 1980s and 2000s. Academic work practices, disciplinary contexts and academic identify are seen to provide sources of stability against such change.

It is important to reflect on the value added by the comparative perspective. Norway, England and Sweden were selected for the studies on which the book is based as a result of conversations between colleagues who chose to align their various studies. In essence, convenience sampling was used to select the countries. The analysis is methodologically appropriate and interesting differences are teased out. Naturally however, given the topic, there is a tendency to compare England with both Scandinavian countries which leads to various binary comparisons. A more strategic and heterogeneous sample of countries may have helped tease out further and different insights about the nature and forces of higher education change in the period under study.

An obvious limitation and strength of the analysis is its emphasis on European higher education. While the triangulation between countries enhances the monograph's generalisability, it very much presents an analysis of most relevance to readers with an interest in European higher education. Many of the trends discussed in the book are international, but the focus is evidently European. It illustrates the strength of European thinking about higher education, and points of contrast with other national and regional systems around the world.

The monograph is an obvious compilation of thinking associated with the source projects. While worth reading as a text in its own right, it takes on greater meaning for those aware of the contexts and sources of the compilation. That is, the book is very much one for “those in the know”. The book rests on the credentials of its source projects, and offers a structure and perspective that reflects this background.

Very little consideration is given to the nature of the student experience and learning. This might seem appropriate, from one angle, given the policy‐level focus of the analysis. From another, however, it both reflects the lack of student considerations in the chapter‐length analyses, and perhaps, more generally, the policies during this period of higher education. Student matters are considered, although with a concentration on funding and resourcing and by way of example. Two chapters are offered on academic staff, but none on the students they teach.

The text closes by summarising key change outcomes, sources of this change and possible reasons for the differences in change across the three countries. It concludes that change at the system or institution level does not necessary ripple through to change in practice, that individual practice has changed less than systems, that forces beyond higher education shape change as much as specific policies, and that uncoordinated change processes interact to create complex and uncertain operating conditions. If higher education globally is undergoing further and more rapid change than in the period analysed in the text, which is very likely, the text will retain its relevance for some years yet.