Higher Education and Equality of Opportunity: Cross-National Perspectives [Hardcover]

Succinct and immensely readable, this is required reading for university leaders. Examples from a dozen lands illustrate the altruism and the avarice characterizing expansion of global education. No recent title covers the waterfront as well as this study does. Tussling with strangled budgets and unremitting admissions pressure, we need the insights offered here with wit and wisdom. Just occasionally we get a volume as good as this.This collection of twenty chapters, written by experts from various countries, offers an insightful and informative debate on higher education and equality of opportunities in the global economy. The authors employ diverse theoretical perspectives and mixed methodologies, both qualitative and qualitative, and the comparative aspects of their analysis add to the overall richness of discourses employed. What is indeed innovative is both the books focus on current cross national dilemmas in higher education, and the comparative analysis of current developments in higher education globally. As such, this volume is a must-read and is warmly recommended to higher education analysts, policy makers, graduate students and the professoriate interested in globalisation and higher education reforms, equity, access, cultural and economic capital and social stratification of higher education.This volume provides a broad overview of recent higher education policy in a variety of countries, both developed and developing, around the world. Using interdisciplinary methods and analysis, it focuses on how diminishing governmental resources and expanding market forces influence higher education policy in different countries in terms of access, minority status (including ethnic, national and gender groups), affirmative action, quality, and performance.The movement to broaden access to public universities, the dominant strategy during the 1970s and 1980s, has largely shifted to enable the marketplace, rather than the government, to shape the contours of higherls!