Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Higher Education

James E. Côté, Sarah Pickard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000538724
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Higher education has come under increasing public scrutiny in recent years, assailed with demands for greater efficiency, accountability, cost reduction, and, above all, job training. Drawing upon examples from across the world, with an emphasis on Anglo-American higher-education systems, this handbook employs sociological approaches to address these pressing concerns. The second edition is thoroughly updated and adds several new chapters to shed further light on the transformations wrought by the interrelated processes of massification, vocationalization, and marketization that have swept through universities in the wake of neoliberal reforms introduced by governments since the 1980s.

The handbook explores recent developments in higher-education systems and policy as well as the everyday experiences of students and staff and ongoing problems of inequality and diversity within universities. In doing so, the chapters address a number of current issues concerning the legitimacy of higher-educational credentials, from the continuing debate regarding traditional pedagogies and the role of universities in social class reproduction to more recent concerns about standards in mass systems.

Collectively, this handbook demonstrates that the sociology of higher education has the potential to play a leadership role in improving the myriad higher-education systems around the world that are now part of an interrelated set of subsystems, replete with both persistent problems and promising prospects. This book is therefore necessary reading for a variety of stakeholders within academia as well as professionals and policy-makers interested in understanding higher education and the acute challenges it faces.

Section IV Anglo-American systems contrasted

Editors' introduction

The chapters in this section focus on how higher-education systems in several strategically selected countries and regions—based on their size and influence globally—compare with those governed by the Anglo-American model. As argued in the previous sections, Anglo-American institutions have been buffeted by competing stakeholder pressures as they have expanded through the mass and universal phases of development under the influence of neoliberal economic ideologies. We see in the eight chapters in this section how other countries and regions have shared these experiences, in varying degrees, sometimes due to Anglo-American colonial influences and sometimes in response to global status competitions with Anglo-American institutions in a neoliberal climate.

This section opens with several chapters on European higher-education models that provide instructive contrasts with the Anglo-American model, even as these other models have come under the influence of neoliberalism and associated status competitions exemplified in global prestige rankings. The opening chapter by Alan Scott and Pier Paolo Pasqualoni focuses on the prevailing model in Germany and Austria, both of which have been heavily influenced by Humboldtian philosophy, which promotes the idea of education as a means of pure (noninstrumental) intellectual and personal development through which the (unique) individual can achieve full potential as part of transformative educational experiences. In this tradition, which influenced earlier Anglo-American institutions, higher education is ideally an inherently transformative activity and thus a model that is incompatible with the neoliberal governance models, such as the new public management corporate model that has been imposed over the past few decades. In contrast to the Humboldtian model, new public management promotes a transactional approach to teaching and research that limits faculty autonomy and self-direction. Consequently, universities attempting to follow the Humboldtian model currently face numerous contradictions, foremost of which is central control by the state, but also status competitions with Anglo-American institutions that now dominate the global landscape, even though they lack the ‘scholarly cachet’ of Humboldtian institutions. Scott and Pasqualoni Conclude with considerations of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (which they argue has a less negative impact on the German system than on Anglo-American systems) and shifts in how the Humboldtian model been heralded variously from the political right to the political left in response to macro-level pressures on higher educational systems.

The Russian case provides interesting contrasts and comparisons to Anglo-American systems, as outlined by Anna Smolentseva in the second chapter of this section. The Russian system has a tumultuous history of a series of rises and falls through the Czarist, Soviet, and then post-Soviet eras. Based on the European idea of university, throughout this history, the Russian System has been distinctive in its focus on state-defined needs; centralized control; a greater focus on teaching over research; and a preference for science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects or disciplines. At the same time, it has experienced the evolution through mass to universal systems and, in the post-Soviet era, neoliberal pressures driving marketization and vocationalization. Status issues have also seen unique configurations, such as preferences for academic credentials in the Soviet era even though there was no greater economic reward for these credentials. In the post-Soviet era, these positional-status competitions can now be found with a vertical stratification of higher-education institutions, in which lower-level mass institutions suffer in terms of funding and faculty recruitment, along with the quality of mass education. Higher-education institutions at the bottom of this stratified hierarchy are disproportionately servicing lower-income students, as is the case in the Anglo-American system. In Russia, we thus find the same questions being asked about the value of higher education beyond its positional advantages over lower forms of education and among the vertically stratified higher educational institutions.

In the chapter that follows, Ivor Goodson and Rūta Petkuté give readers a unique glimpse into post-Soviet Lithuania of the confluence of influences outlined in the two preceding chapters in the context of recently imposed neoliberal governance models: the foundational influence of the humanistic German Humboldtian model and the lingering impact of the Soviet model. Based on a granular analysis of academics’ professional narratives derived from a targeted qualitative study, and reminiscent of chapters in Part II of this volume (Life in Higher Education Institutions for Students and Faculty), Goodson and Petkuté argue that undemocratic and utilitarian neoliberal governance has rendered Lithuanian faculty members passive, disengaged, and powerless while giving power over academic matters to policymakers, university administrators, and students. These narratives evoke the Soviet-era ‘schizophrenic’ reality when, under that ideological regime, people were forced to live ‘double’ and fabricated (rather than authentic) lives. The authors point out a parallel between the Soviet system, which neglected Lithuanian cultural legacy and made unrealistic promises about a brighter future, and contemporary neoliberal reforms, which fetishize constant change while ignoring long-standing local academic traditions and values. Consequently, another form of tyranny has been imposed that restricts professional autonomy and academic judgment. Moreover, they argue that the Soviet system paradoxically offered more space for academics to pursue their professional agendas than does the contemporary system. Goodson and Petkute conclude that the micromanaged neoliberal educational model represents a particularly narrow version of the social world and has had a more penetrating effect on the deliverability of academic practice than did the Soviet model, which was often superficially implemented in practice. In treating the Lithuanian case as an exemplar of the negative influence of neoliberalism on academic life, this chapter stands as an important contribution to our understanding of the political forces buffeting higher education globally and the new forms of oppressiveness that have merged.

The French system, the subject of the next chapter in this section, shows a striking contrast to the German, Russian, and Lithuanian models. Sarah Pickard describes the French system as one rife with internal contradictions in a nation founded on the principles of liberté, egalité, fraternité. The French system is still rigidly stratified while at the same resistant to reform, perhaps because its patriotic ideals blind citizens to current realities. Thus, Pickard observes a 'striking paradox.' On the one hand, there is an ethos of egalitarian access and a highly redistributive welfare state. On the other hand, there is a socially stratified, hierarchical, and elitist highereducation system. Some highly selective elite institutions (including the grandes écoles) charge high tuition fees and cater to about 20 percent of the student body.. The vast majority of students attend the more recently built publicly funded mass institutions, which have lower standards of admission in spite of ostensibly following a democratic ideal. Although they have very low registration fees, these non-selective institutions also have very high incompletion rates. Perhaps as a result of efforts of neoliheral governments’ attempts to reduce incompletion by vocationalizing universities while at the same time underfunding them, over the past decade, public universities have become a less popular option in France than other forms of more direct vocational educational paths. France is also unique in legally forbidding data dissemination in terms of students’ ethnic group and religion, so it is difficult to analyze its system’s efforts at democratization, and it is consequently not possible to institute affirmative action programs. In terms of the equitystandards debate, Pickard paints a picture of France seeking a restricted form of equity that does not threaten elite interests while at the same time excessively lowering standards of mass university education because of a lack of true commitment to democratic ideals.

The following chapter illustrates how the Nordic model of higher education has fared through the niassiflcation, vocationalization, and marketization experienced by AngloAmerican systems. Risto Rhine and Ari Antikainen outline how, consequent to their shared history the Nordic countries have developed a unique model of the welfare state in which education is crucial. The Nordic general model of education is based On public and free education at all levels that places a special emphasis on equal opportunities and minimizing inequalities, Although the neoliberal turn has affected the Nordic model (with higher education seen as a driver of economic growth and as a private rather than a public good), the authors argue that the Nordic countries have retained their social-democratic core policies such as the right to study in institutions of higher education free of charge and ready geographic access to these institutions. These countries have also maintained their position among the world's leading countries in political rights, civil liberties, and quality of life. Moreover, they have been very successful in international comparative evaluation studies in terms of educational quality, with Finland standing out most.

Focusing on South Asia, Siri Hettige next offers another thought-provoking contrast to Anglo-American higher educational systems. Hettige observes that the liberal arts system, once modeled on the elite British system and popular during the colonial period, has declined considerably in legitimacy in South Asian countries and has even been targeted by some governments for vocationalization or elimination. Higher-education institutions in this region once provided a means of upward mobility for those who were recruited into elites and who acted as role models for other aspiring citizens while also setting in motion expansions of these systems. Influenced by the neoliberal turn experienced elsewhere in the world, though, higher learning is currently a mainly instrumental activity in this region in a polarized system where expensive, private institutions provide training largely for corporate positions and inexpensive, publicly funded institutions (considered locally to be of low quality) train students for low-level whitecollar work, to the extent that such work opportunities are even available locally. Neoliberalism has exacerbated these problems rather than correcting them, as increasing income inequality has contributed to a further polarization in higher-education institutions. In many cases, university degrees are considered worthless in local economies, even in countries with low literacy rates and very low attendance rates in tertiary institutions. At the same time, because of quality and status problems, brain drain has been a problem, as elite Anglo-American universities have drawn children from wealthy families seeking lucrative careers in vocationally oriented fields elsewhere. Hettige argues, however, that the COVID-19 pandemic has made die geographic mobility of students extremely difficult. He adds that whereas there are signs of increasing localization of provision of higher education, the socioeconomic changes due to the pandemic will shape the sector in the near future.

The remaining two chapters in this section focus on two major Asian economic powers that have developed systems that both reflect and compete with Anglo-American institutions. Hiroyuki Takagi describes how Japan has been affected by internationalization since the beginning of its commercial contact with the West. The current model is a unique combination of the Anglo-American and Germanic systems. Although Japan was never a Western colony, there have been efforts dating back to the ISOffe to parallel Western institutions as part of modernization efforts. These efforts have included inviting Western academics to teach there, as well as inviting Western students to study there. More recently, however, as Western countries have become interested in internalization to further market their educational products, Japanese universities have stepped up efforts to improve their international competitiveness, especially as measured by global rankings, These developments have ushered in an imitation of Western neoliberal managerial practices in which the government has compelled selected universities to compete globally in order to achieve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• SECTION I Anglo-American higher-education institutions through time and place
• SECTION II Life in higher-education institutions for students and faculty
• SECTION III Inequality and diversity in higher education
• SECTION IV Anglo-American systems contrasted
• SECTION V Higher education in a global policy perspective
• Index