ABSTRACT
It is often claimed that higher education represents an emancipatory project. Barnett (1990) argued that the overall project of higher education entails students learning to engage in critical self-reflection and to question what is taken for granted. Significant intellectual and personal growth can accompany participation in higher education. There have been suggestions also that society as a whole benefits. Gutmann (1987), for instance, claimed that higher education has an important part to play in establishing and maintaining democratic societies consisting of free citizens. It is evidently thus a cause for concern when rates of participation in higher education vary according to socio-economic status or ethnicity, for instance, given the inequalities that are likely to occur on a range of levels.
