ABSTRACT
Higher education in the UK has been characterised in the last two decades by significant and rapid change. Despite the expansion of higher education (HE) that had taken place in the wake of the Robbins Report (1963), by the mid 1980s there were less than 60 universities, and participation rates were approximately 6 per cent – only six in every hundred 18-year-olds progressed to take an under - graduate degree. Twenty years later the landscape of higher education has been transformed, with some 140 universities and university colleges providing under - graduate programmes for 42 per cent (and rising) of all 18-year-olds. In addition to the growth of British undergraduates, universities have seen significant expansion of ‘overseas’ student numbers. In the mid 1980s students from outside the UK numbered approximately 20,000, while by 2008 this had grown to 350,000. And it has not only been in student numbers where expansion has been witnessed. Universities are all, to varying degrees, engaged in other academic and scholarly activities, ranging from provision for Continuing Professional Development (CPD), to research activity funded by government, charities or the private sector, to enterprise ranging from direct consultancy services to the generation of spin-out companies to the commercialisation of research products and all have shown significant growth since 1980 (HEFCE 2007). In the space of these two decades the British university system may be characterised as changing from a small collegium of medium-sized, research-and educationfocused organisations to a knowledge-based service industry of medium and large enterprises with diverse missions, profiles and character – as Teixeira et al. have indicated, ‘all across the world, higher education has become a large enterprise’ (2004: 1). Universities have become a key element of the economic profile of the UK, just as they have become a key component of the global service sector (Bretton 2003).
