The purpose of this volume is to help jump-start an urgently needed conversation about fairness and justice in access to higher education to counteract the ubiquitous mantras of neoliberal globalization and managerialism. The book seeks to carve out a strong moral and normative basis for opposing mainstream developments that engender increasing inequality and market-dependency in higher education. The book’s chapters consider how different national communities channel access to higher education, what their “implicit social contracts” are, and what outcomes are produced by different policies and methods. The book is essential reading for scholars of higher education and students concerned with increasing inequality in a globalizing educational marketplace.

American Higher Education in a Global Context: Historical Perspectives describes the current state of universities on each continent, providing a comprehensive analysis of the numerous factors that have affected higher education systems around the world. This book studies higher education from its emergence in antiquity to the establishment of the American research university model and its adoption around the globe, through the current Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant economic and political crisis. The author pays special attention to the shortcomings of the neoliberal trend of the last four decades, which increased social stratification at institutions of higher learning. Calling for an expansion of access to tertiary education, and in particular, to research universities, this book examines the competition between China and the United States in the field of higher education, stressing the importance of academic freedom, without which there can be no true academic excellence.

How can new ways of thinking about education improve the lives of poor students? In Rethinking Education and Poverty, William G. Tierney brings together scholars from around the world to examine the complex relationship between poverty and education in the twenty-first century. International in scope, this book assembles the best contemporary thinking about how education can mediate class and improve the lives of marginalized individuals. In remarkably nuanced ways, this volume examines education's role as both a possible factor in perpetuating—and a tool for alleviating—entrenched poverty. Education has long been seen as a way out of poverty. Some critics, however, argue that educational systems mask inequality and perpetuate cycles of poverty and wealth; others believe that the innate resilience or intellectual ability of impoverished students is what allows those individuals to succeed. Rethinking Education and Poverty grapples in turn with the ramifications of each possibility. Throughout these compelling, far-reaching, and provocative essays, the contributors seek to better understand how local efforts to reduce poverty through education interact—or fail to interact—with international assessment efforts. They take a broad historical view, examining social, economic, and educational polices from the postWorld War II period to the end of the Cold War and beyond. Although there is no simple solution to inequality, this book makes clear that education offers numerous exciting possibilities for progress.

This book deepens readers’ conceptual understanding of and provides practical insights into Vietnam’s higher education reforms. Globalisation has had profound impacts on higher education worldwide, creating transnational linkages and junctures, as well as disjunctures. At the same time, it has generated fluidities, hybridities and mobilities. Within the postcolonial context of Vietnam, it is imperative to identify the unique global traits that characterise the Vietnamese higher education system. The book focuses specifically on key aspects of culture and values that are decisive to the reform of Vietnamese higher education under the forces of globalisation. It critically examines how global forces have shaped and reshaped Vietnam’s higher education landscape. At the same time, the book explores local demands on Vietnamese higher education, and deciphers how higher education institutions are responding to globalisation, internationalisation and local demands. Based on empirical research, theoretical approaches and the experiences of researchers from Vietnam and overseas, it addresses critical perspectives on the aspects fundamental to the reform of Vietnamese higher education and outlines viable paths for the future.

Today, there are generally universities in Africa rather than ‘African universities’. The legitimacy of the university in Africa is under serious questions now because of its complicity in racism, patriarchy, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, genocide, epistemicide, linguicide, culturecide, and alienation. In other words, the university in Africa as we know it today is elitist and exclusionary. Therefore, rethinking the idea of the university is fundamental to overcoming its current deficiencies in the Global South. This volume, bringing together a number of national case studies and macro-analyses on the dynamics of changing higher education in the Global South, gestures towards the desired, imagined decolonial African university, which should be a site of multilingualism where African indigenous languages, cosmologies and ontologies become a central part of its identity and soul, intolerant of epistemicides, linguicides, and cultural imperialism, but a site of cognitive and social justice that fully embraces the idea that all human beings are born into valid, useful, relevant and legitimate knowledge systems.

This book is the first systematic attempt to examine one of the biggest challenges facing universities and society in the 21st century: how do we create opportunities to allow people from all social backgrounds to benefit from higher education? It examines how policymakers, higher education institutions and civil society organisations are meeting this challenge across the globe. Each chapter focuses on one of 12 countries, including the economically powerful US and Germany, developing nations from Africa and South America and the new higher education 'superpowers' of China and India. Access to Higher Education shows that across these different nations inequalities in higher education participation are common, but their nature differs. It argues for a new, 'nationhood' based approach to understanding why these differences exist.

In an increasingly globalised educational landscape, this book examines whether the principle of educational equality can be applied across nation state borders. Exploring the tension between the theory of educational equality and the reality that most educational institutions are rooted in local communities and national frameworks, the author thus probes the consequences for institutions, individuals and communities as the number of international students grows exponentially. A topic that has previously received limited attention, the author draws upon theoretical literature and an empirical study of how universities in the United Kingdom conceptualise and promote principles of educational equality for international as compared with home students. This pioneering work will be interest and value to students and scholars of international education, international students, educational equality and globalisation, as well as practitioners and policy makers.