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Introducing the Evaluative State
The literature supports the idea that higher education has undergone significant change across the world. Common explanations of the causes of change are clear and powerful in their simplicity. Firstly, a new utilitarian view of the purposes of higher education has won out over contending traditional and liberal views (Greatrix, 2001). Simply put, the economic view of the purpose of higher education has come to dominate government and civil society attitudes towards universities. Higher education today is commonly regarded as the ‘servant to the economy’ (Greatrix, 2001: 13). In the view of theorists of the accountability movement (King Alexander, 2000; Muller and Wright (1994), this new economic motivation drives the move by governments to demand greater accountability, responsiveness, productivity and efficiency from higher education institutions. In this regard, states are looking to universities to provide the human capacity and the knowledge requirements that will drive technological innovation, enhance economic productivity and facilitate global competitiveness.
Barnett (2003: 2) has described the traditional role of universities as promoting ‘knowledge, truth and reason.’ Preston (2001) has taken a more economic view of the modern university’s role as that of a producer of knowledge for global consumption, while Barrett (1998), in a provocative title, asks, `What is the function of a university? Ivory tower or trade school for plumbers?’.
The above theorists suggest that the shift from traditional conceptualisations of the purpose of higher education to more functional notions of the relationship between higher education and society has driven the pace of change in the sector globally.
Secondly, a political paradigm shift in the twenty-first century regarding the way the citizenry views government, coupled with increased calls for participatory democracy, has led to a demand by civil society and business across the world for a reduction in state control, or at least in the intensity and visibility of such control.
Thirdly, a global context defined by the need and desire to exercise financial constraint in relation to government spending of public funds has led to the dominance of cost-cutting strategies, and greater demands by the state for the demonstration of value for money in return for their investments in higher education. Hence the three most powerful drivers of change in the relationship between higher education and state have been the result of an ideological struggle around the purposes of higher education, of shifting political paradigms and of the need to exercise constraint in state spending.
The new view of the purpose of higher education has had a huge impact on all dimensions of the relationship between the state and higher education. Not only has it asserted the demand for universities to serve the economy but it has also recast the higher education system as a critical lever for social change, in which the type of change required is both pre-determined and stable, but also ever-changing. If one accepts this as a fundamental principle underpinning the relationship between state and higher education, it follows that universities could conceivably be called upon to serve any number of diverse and even contradictory ends in the name of economic development and social change. An essential feature of this new relationship is the need for flexibility and responsiveness, since it is these two characteristics of the higher education sector which enable ongoing re-adjustment to changing needs and demands.
It is within this explanatory context that key concepts such as responsiveness, accountability and productivity have come to frame the discourse examining global patterns of shifting relationships between government and the higher education sector.
The Evaluative State: Higher education, human resource development and economic growth
Two major and related sources of change in higher education in Western Europe have been linked in the literature to the emergence of the Evaluative State. Firstly, economic growth generated the need to raise skills levels, especially in the areas of science and technology; hence the need for higher education to produce highly skilled workers for the new knowledgebased economy. Massification was achieved as larger numbers of young people were encouraged to enter universities. Given this new role in human resource development, higher education subsequently became the driver for economic growth (Neave, 1988).
Secondly, governments’ reluctance to fund rising costs generated by massification saw a reduction in state spending on higher education. Neave has argued that the need to increase participation in higher education, coupled with the state’s determination to cut spending in this area, generated a particular set of circumstances that demanded a quite different form of state intervention in higher education.
Policy goals and framework targets were designed to be reached through the exercise of new systems of resource allocation. In other words, institutions would be funded only on the basis of having fulfilled certain criteria; these were related to efficiency (doing more with less), productivity (turning out the desired graduates and research outputs quickly), and quality. The state in this period never intended to fund all costs generated by institutions. Rather, underfunding achieved the goal of forcing the sector to become more responsive to external pressures. The market, which institutions had to serve to ensure their continued survival, embodied social demands and the needs of industry and other partners with whom contracts could be negotiated to fund institutional activities which matched their priorities.
Thus, massification and budget costs, as described above, were two elements which effected a major transformation in the higher education sector; they did this by bringing to bear new pressures related to increasing demands for efficiency, productivity, quality, accountability and responsiveness.
Chapter One Approaching the study
Chapter Two Describing the context
Chapter Three Presenting the Argument
Chapter Four Controlling for quality through design
Chapter Five Reporting on the findings (1)
Chapter Six Reporting on the findings (2)
Chapter Seven Communicating the findings
Appendix A Interview protocol: Academics
Appendix B Interview protocol: Institutional managers
Bibliography
