ABSTRACT
As measured by UNESCO and discussed in Chapter 1, the worldwide Gross Tertiary Enrolment Rate (GTER) is increasing very rapidly by historical standards, at 1 per cent a year, and now constitutes one third of the nominal school leaver age group. Participation is expanding significantly in most countries, whatever the level of their GTERs. The tendency towards high participation systems (HPS) of higher education, systems in which the GTER exceeds 50 per cent, has spread from the high-income and post-Soviet zones to include most of the emerging (‘developing’) countries with GDP per capita of $5,000 or more. The growth of higher education is accompanied by economic modernisation, but economic demand is not sufficiently consistent to explain the very widespread expansion of educational participation, which is occurring in countries with very different rates of growth and industry-skill profiles (Marginson 2016a). Rather, as suggested by Trow (1973) in his essay on the transition from elite to mass to universal systems, the ongoing dynamism of higher education is powered by the ambitions of families for social position and of students for self-realisation. These ambitions have no limit and feed on themselves. As participation grows it becomes mandatory for all middle-class families to enrol, for states to respond to the demand for opportunities and for participation to extend further into the urban population. Over time social demand accumulates and tends towards the universal, and higher education becomes ubiquitous.
