Remaking Higher Education Systems: A Comparative Study of Reform Agendas in Australia and the United Kingdom

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative historical analysis of reform processes that made modern higher education systems in Australia and the UK. It traces the changes to national higher education systems in comparable phases in the decades following World War II - from the inquiry-driven reforms to the introduction of binary systems to the emergence of mass systems.The comparative approach is based on case similarities, but a central aim of the thesis is to investigate how differences in context - the national political and policy institutions surrounding higher education - have guided policy reform. The focusing question of the study is why governments chose to pursue agendas of radical higher education change in response to the surge in demand for university places in the late 1980s. The thesis compares differences in how each country moved to policies frequently justified by market liberal principles to address the rapidly emerging challenges of mass higher education. It examines how the agendas unfolded in each country with particular attention to the role of contingent events and continuities of national policy legacies. The prospect of mass enrolments convinced policy actors to argue that tuition fees were necessary to augment the existing "tax funded" system of public grants. Using fees to supplement grant funding resulted in a hybrid policy of a partially privately funded public higher education system. As well as the hybrid funding model, another key reform of the Australian and the UK higher education agendas was a regulatory regime designed to achieve efficient use of resources through competition for funding. From one point of view the policies of tuition fees and competition between higher education providers can be seen as expressions of a cross-national trend of liberalisation. Regime theory and institutionalist theory view the spread of liberalisation as a process that drives convergence around market-based approaches in social and economic policy agendas. However, the most striking contrast between Australia and the UK is the unevenness and the absence of a uniform approach in the agenda processes advancing market-based policies. This is clearly evident in timing and sequencing. Australia put in place a unified regulated system under the hybrid funding model in a period of 18 months. In contrast, it was only after a series of agendas over a decade and a half that a similar arrangement was fully implemented in the UK. Effectiveness in agenda building was also a result of contingencies in the local political environment and to considerable degree of political agency. The 1987-88 reform agenda in Australia swiftly overcame political obstacles to tuition fees through an innovative public policy where a student loans scheme was designed on the principle of deferred (income contingent) repayments. By successfully framing the policy to answer the goals of equity and redistribution its proponents successfully overcame political objections. On the other hand, policy actors in the UK were unable to draw on resources to decisively shape the discourse and the policy agendas. The findings of the thesis have important theoretical implications for more nuanced understanding of the nature of institutional change. Firstly, because policy institutions originate in unique national conditions, this background is essential in a complete account of the process of institutional change. Secondly, as illustrated by the significant cross-national variations in the sequence and content of higher education agendas in Australia and the UK, context always matters. Show more