Higher Education in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Higher education in global overview falls into two models. Most countries follow the elitist pattern of re cruitment, and their efforts on behalf of modernity are tem pered by nineteenth-century style. Their reforms reenact familiar historical precedents. Four countries: the United States, Canada, the USSR, and Japan, have moved to mass higher education. Europe, too, has recently begun making sig nificant steps in that direction. These countries are a target of parallel reform aspirations: demands f or expanded enroll ment, for more equitable social class distribution, and for up grading of non-university institutions to university ranks. Their universities are under pressure to participate in political life and local government, to streamline the structure of gov ernance, and to admit a measure of public control. The West ern European countries are in a somewhat special situation because their enrollments in postcompulsory education are a quarter of an age group less, and their reforms tend to be structural rather than, as in the others, curricular. Among mass-higher-education countries, the USSR and Japan are in many respects closer to Europe than to North America. They favor a guided method of reform from above, while those of North America grow and change in a grass roots fashion. The arrival of the mass of students makes authoritarian control difficult to maintain.