For any colleagues not familiar with it, University World News [2] is an excellent Website to access for its weekly update on universities worldwide.
The current issue (UWN No. 0635 3rd May 2015) has an essay by Simon Marginson, an ex-Melbourne University Australian professor now at the UCL Institute of Education in London, “Is the growth of elite world-class universities fuelling inequality?” which is introduced thus: Simon Marginson “explores the link between wealth and access to the upper reaches of higher education and calls for mass education to be shored up through government guarantees and funding mechanisms”. Marginson draws on Thomas Piketty’s historical approach in his recent Capital in the Twenty-First Century [3]
Another piece, by David Jobbins, to my mind has obvious connections and is also relevant to our PASCAL concern that universities be engaged in important wider issues and not only their own internal and often competitive affairs:
“The US and the UK together dominate the rest of the world in the latest QS World University Rankings by Subject, released last week. The two countries together have 50% of the top 50 places, ahead of regions such as Asia (17%) and mainland Europe (15.5%). The US has 36.6% of top 50 places and the UK 14%.” These rankings can be seen to be a major obstacle to both relevance and equity in higher education.
In a third piece, by Yajana Sharma, reports on ‘Ministers seeking Asia-Europe cooperation on skills gap [4]’, a subject of keen interest especially to the Pascal Australian RMIT EUC base as to the European base at the University of Glasgow within the EU and its Asian counterpart frameworks: “Collaboration between universities in Europe and Asia can help improve quality of education, student mobility and ultimately the employability of graduates, a conference of Asian and European higher education ministers held in Riga, Latvia heard last week”.
Returning to the main article, Marginson concludes that his proposals will not resolve “the problem of a self-enriching plutocracy, and establish a polity in the US and elsewhere that is no longer controlled by wealth, but it will help. It will assert democratic social values and restrengthen the educational alternative to money and inheritance as determinants of social participation and selection…
These trends remind us of the public and political character of higher education. Education is a matter of social relations. We are all affected by the number and value of high value educational places and by what governs access to those places. We need to assert the role of higher education as a public good and as a response to social and economic inequality – rather than a mechanism for enhancing inequality, or a dead end with limited capacity to lift the individual and collective position.”
For the full text of the Marginson discussion see http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2015042917124158 [5]