Full Description
How do we understand and explain who has access to higher education? How do we make sense of persisting and new forms of inequality? How can global, national and institutional policymakers and practitioners make higher education more inclusive? Access to Higher Education: Theoretical perspectives and contemporary challenges seeks to update thinking on these questions, combining new voices and emerging perspectives with established writers in the field.
This pioneering text highlights the contribution of social theory to issues of access to education, with chapters introducing and drawing on the works of key interdisciplinary thinkers including Pierre Bourdieu, Margaret Archer, Amartya Sen and Herbert Simon. It then moves to examines how theoretical perspectives can be applied to the contemporary challenges of forging more equal access, with examples drawn from a wide range of contexts, including the UK, the US, Australia, South Africa and Japan.
Global in scope, this book documents the shared nature of the access challenge in a period when higher education is growing rapidly, but inequalities continue to be stark. It concludes by proposing a new direction for research and a reassertion of the role of the researcher as a social activist for disconnected and disadvantaged groups, equipped with the thinking tools needed to move the agenda forward.
Access to Higher Education is a rigorous text for the global research community, with relevance to policymakers, practitioners and postgraduate students interested in social justice and social policy. It provides those with an academic interest in access and a commitment to enhancing policy with theoretical and practical ideas for moving the access agenda forward in their institutional, regional or national contexts.
Contents
Section 1: Access to higher education
Chapter 1 - Global trends of access to and equity in postsecondary education
Chiao-Ling Chien, Patrick Montjouridès and Hendrik van der Pol
Chapter 2 - The stratification of opportunity in high participation systems (HPS) of higher education
Simon Marginson
Section 2: Theoretical perspectives
Chapter 3 - Capitals and habitus: a Bourdieusian framework for understanding transitions into higher education and student experiences
Ciaran Burke
Chapter 4 - Explaining inequality? Rational action theories of educational decision making
Ron Thompson
Chapter 5 - Student choices under uncertainty: bounded rationality and behavioural economics
Neil Harrison
Chapter 6 - Higher education: too risky a decision?
Malcolm Brynin
Chapter 7 - Widening access with success: using the capabilities approach to confront injustices
Merridy Wilson-Strydom
Chapter 8 - Reflexivity and agency: critical realist and Archerian analyses of access and participation
Peter Kahn
Section 3: Contemporary challenges
Chapter 9 - Framing and making of access policies: the case of Palestinian Arabs in higher education in Israel
Ayala Hendin, Dalia Ben-Rabi and Faisal Azaiza
Chapter 10 - Widening access in a vast country: opportunities and challenges in Australia
Ann Jardine
Chapter 11 - Accessing postgraduate study in the United States for African Americans: relating the roles of family, fictive kin, faculty, and student affairs practitioners
Carmen M. McCallum, Julie R. Posselt and Estefanía López
Chapter 12 - Participation and access in higher education in Russia: continuity and change of a positional advantage
Anna Smolentseva
Chapter 13 - Can Holistic and Contextualised Admission (HaCA) widen access at highly selective universities? Experiences from England and the United States
Anna Mountford-Zimdars
Chapter 14 - Diversifying admissions through top-down entrance examination reform in Japanese elite universities: what is happening on the ground?
Beverley Anne Yamamoto
Chapter 15 - The mobility imperative: English students and 'fair' access to international higher education
Rachel Brooks and Johanna Waters
Conclusion
