Drawing on various disciplinary and scholarly approaches to the multiple roles of higher education in society, this paper offers a new conceptualisation of the non-economic contributions of higher education. The conceptual model identifies two basic dimensions in higher education's contributions to society. The first, axiological dimension…

Human capital theory assumes that education determines the marginal productivity of labour and this determines earnings. Since the 1960s, it has dominated the economics, and policy and public understanding, of relations between education and work. It has become widely assumed that intellectual formation constitutes a mode of economic capital,…

How and when does affirmative action emerge in different national contexts? This paper is the first to analyze the emergence of affirmative action in higher education across national contexts. We find that three distinct clusters of affirmative action policies developed historically: (1) early nation-building projects, (2) mechanisms to attenuate…

The promise of higher education remains elusive for many Indigenous students in Australia. To date, institutional efforts to improve the persistence and retention of Indigenous students have been largely piecemeal, poorly integrated and designed to remediate skill deficits. Yet, market-led expansion of Australian higher education is driving…

Although the system of educational credentials differs in many important ways from country to country, all western countries have experienced a similar trend in the form of an increasing number of graduate degrees. Graduate degrees have also taken on a bewildering range of forms and content. As a consequence, not all graduate degrees have the same…

Drawing on the work of Bernstein and Maton and using a case-study approach, this study explores the formation of an undergraduate history curriculum at the University of Cape Town. This article focuses on two periods of curriculum formation referred to as history as canon and history as social science. With respect to these two curriculum periods…

This article aims to address a theoretical question, "what is the relationship between knowledge structure and curriculum structure?", by answering an empirical, context-specific question, "what drives and legitimates the curriculum in one sociology department?", with an emphasis on surfacing the "recontextualising rules" at work in this…

The concept of academic freedom in higher education is endangered both epistemologically (with the possibility of obtaining objective knowledge in doubt) and sociologically (with the incorporation of higher education systems into the modern state). For higher education to be legitimized, these dangers must be countered. (MSE)

An analysis of the two basic types of curriculum (collection curriculum, emphasizing the autonomy of subjects, and integrated curriculum, emphasizing the connections between subjects) and the theory of their cyclical relationship through redefinition and collapse of subject boundaries in relationship to political forces for purity and relevance.…

Research of Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s concerning higher education is reviewed and three phases of work are distinguished. The work, primarily in the sociology of education, is then compared with some issues currently dominating discussion, practice, and research in higher education in the United Kingdom. (MSE)

The development and validation of a measure of classroom psychosocial environment based on student and teacher perceptions of seven environmental dimensions (personalization, involvement, student cohesiveness, satisfaction, task orientation, innovation, and individualization) of seminars and tutorials are described. (MSE)