Introduction
The history of higher education goes back centuries and in a few African, Asian, and European countries for more than millennia. But the bulk of the world’s universities were established in the twentieth century, the vast majority since 1945. Before World War II, higher education, where it was available, was largely characterized by elitism and sexism in so far as it was primarily accessible to men from privileged backgrounds. Also, liberal arts education was prized over professional training, and public investment and state intervention remained relatively limited. All this was to change in the face of the profound, complex, and contradictory transformations in national and global political economies wrought by the war and its unpredictable aftermath.
Higher education was characterized by many new developments that will be explored in this book. One of the most immediate and far-reaching was the trend toward massification as demand accelerated, the number of universities and other post-secondary institutions exploded, and public interest intensified in the emerging welfare states and developmentalist states of the developed and developing countries, respectively. Comprehensive universities, which combined, often uneasily and sometimes contentiously, commitments to teaching and research, disciplinary and professional education, and intellectual pursuits and public service rose to the top of the pecking order in the increasingly diverse, differentiated, and hierarchical domestic and international higher education order.
These changes were facilitated by a wide array of political, economic, social, and cultural forces in the tumultuous postwar world. Key among them was rapid population growth, urbanization, decolonization, and demands from women and other disadvantaged groups for the inclusive opportunities of higher education, which was seen as a desirable public good. The rapid growth of higher education resulted in significant changes in the purpose and rationale of universities, their management and governance, funding sources and models, quality and value, and modes of access and accountability.
There can be little doubt that the dynamics and trajectories of higher education varied enormously within and between countries and different world regions. This book seeks to compare the patterns of growth, processes of change, and the challenges and opportunities encountered by universities as they confronted and negotiated internal and external transformations, and the pressing and conflicting demands of the academy and society for new knowledges, innovation, autonomy, accessibility, affordability, and accountability.
This chapter provides a broad overview of the postwar boom in higher education in different world regions. It is divided into four parts. First, it examines the explosive growth in the number of higher education institutions in every world region. Second, it chronicles and compares the patterns of growth in student enrollments, which turned pre-World War elite education into postwar mass education. Massification had a profound impact on the organization, role, and purposes of higher education. It offered unprecedented opportunities for higher education and social mobility for previously marginalized social groups of low income or racial and ethnic backgrounds, as well as for women. But social inequalities based on gender, class, ethnicity, race, and nationality persisted, and higher education became a powerful force for reproducing old structures of inequality and producing new forms of marginalization. This is the third focus of the chapter. Finally, the chapter outlines some of the key disruptive forces that faced higher education as the twentieth century transitioned into the twenty-first century. Some of the issues are discussed more fully in subsequent chapters, but this chapter looks at the emerging demographic challenges in greater detail, noting two broad global trends. One was the specter of demographic decline haunting not only many of the developed countries, especially Europe and Japan, but also China. The other trend was the demographic bulge in the developing countries especially in Africa. Both trends had grave implications for the future of higher education institutions and the economy in these countries.
Institutional Explosion
In 1945, higher education was largely confined to what were called in the development discourse of the postwar world, the developed countries and some of the major developing countries. Large swathes of colonial territories and recently independent countries did not even have a single university. Altogether, in 1944, the world had 3703 degree-granting higher education institutions, a fifth of the number in 2015. 1 Thus, over the next 70 years, higher education institutions grew by a staggering 408 %, or at annual rate of 5.83 %.
The expansion resulted from several interlocking developments, including the creation of entirely new institutions, the conversion of existing constituent colleges or branch campuses into autonomous institutions, amalgamations of assorted institutions into new institutions, and the upgrading of lower-level institutions into higher education institutions. These processes played themselves out in various ways in different countries, but they were evident in one or the other almost everywhere.
The USA was the undisputed colossus of global higher education in 1944. The country’s 1327 higher education institutions represented more than a third of the world’s total. Overall, North America claimed 39.2 % of the world’s higher education institutions, followed by Europe with 32.2 %, Asia 21.2 %, and trailing further behind was Latin America and the Caribbean with about 4.0 %, Africa with a mere 0.83 %, and Oceania with 0.62 %. There were glaring discrepancies among countries in the number of institutions within each region at the end of World War II. In North America, Canada and Mexico had a handful of higher education institutions in 1944, numbering 60 and 63, respectively, less than 10 % of the US total.
In Europe, Russia dominated; its 320 higher education institutions represented a quarter of Europe’s 1266 institutions at the end of 1944. The next leading countries with 20 or more institutions included the UK (177), France (131), Ukraine (127), Germany (99), Poland (41), Italy (40), Spain (34), Belgium (24), Ireland (21), and Hungary (20). They were followed by two, Austria and Belarus, which had 18 institutions each, then Switzerland with 14, and Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Holy See, and Sweden each of which had 13. Five countries had between 10 and 12 institutions. For the remaining ones, nine had five or more institutions, five had one institution, and seven had none.
The hierarchy in Asia was led by the Philippines with 185 institutions, followed by China (177), Japan (173), India (50), Republic of Korea (35), Thailand (33), Uzbekistan (19), Taiwan (17), and Kazakhstan and Pakistan, each with 16. Combined, the ten countries claimed the lion’s share, 67.9 %, of contemporary Asia’s 45 countries. Sixteen countries did not have a single...