Political attacks that seek to frame universities in terms of a “conspiracy of the elite” have their roots in the sense of isolation felt by those left out of rising higher education participation and the disappointment felt by struggling graduates, a leading tertiary education scholar has argued.
In a keynote lecture at the Centre for Global Higher Education’s annual conference in London, its director Simon Marginson claimed the increased targeting of universities in the US, UK and in eastern Europe was also partly explained by the expansion of higher education since the 1960s and the greater presence of higher-earning graduates in the workforce.
Giving the Burton R. Clark lecture at the UCL Institute of Education on 15 February, Professor Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, observed that “now that participation has expanded to half of the population but not everyone, the stratification and exclusion effects of higher education are more visible on a large scale than either its contribution to the earning power of graduates…or its potentials to lift opportunity and mobility.”
“Segmentation between people with and without higher education is readily mobilised in populist political campaigns,” he added.
