Societal outcomes of the educational purposes of higher education: Study

In a recent paper published in Higher Education, researcher Paul Ashwin studied how the societal outcomes and purposes of higher education have been discussed in the journal over the last 50 years. Ashwin examined papers on the societal purposes of higher education that were published in the first 80 volumes of Higher Education. As higher education has become more stratified, the author found that most papers aligned with the models for higher education that posit a single societal educational purpose for higher education systems. In turn, there was less discussion of the outcomes served by different types of higher education. In the future, Ashwin suggests that the discussion around higher education needs to be refocused from the idea of “the University” to the purposes of higher education systems, which would help to better understand the diversity within higher education systems and the increasing vertical stratification therein. Higher Education Note: Archived stories may contain dead links or be missing source links.