Social justice is a concept that means equality and fairness. In education, this means equal access and opportunity for all students to maximize their fullest potential to become productive and contributive members of society. Within the last decade, the notion of teaching for social justice has become popularized in teacher education. Most…

Australia's Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) is an income contingent loan scheme, in which university students pay back part of the costs of their tuition after their post-university income reaches a certain threshold, is an important policy innovation for the financing of higher education. However, its critics claim that HECS increases…

This article analyses the innovation agenda of the European Union (EU), places it in the context of globalisation and explores its foundation in the theoretical innovation systems perspective. It analyses a number of the central policy domains of this agenda: higher education, doctoral education, research and knowledge transfer. In the second part…

This article examines the access policies in Portuguese higher education, from the 1974 revolution to the present. Recently, under the simultaneous pressure of a declining birth rate and increasing financial stringency, higher education institutions, both public and private, have started to compete for students, while responding to increasing…

The principle of equality states that it is bad for some people to be worse off than others. In the context of distance education, this principle is violated on those occasions where on-campus students have access, not only to all the resources available to distance education students, but also to face-to-face tutorials. This is because the…

Demand for university education has increased due to the recent innovations of universal, free and compulsory education at the basic and senior secondary education level. Education has been expanding very rapidly at all levels in Nigeria. However, there are serious problems related to quality, equity, unavailable human and material resources and…

Since 1965 the federal government has attempted to provide low socioeconomic status students with equal access to postsecondary education through the Higher Education Act and its multiplicative programmatic efforts. Implemented as one such program in 1998, the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or GEAR UP, has been…

The purpose of this chapter is to continue and potentially expand the conversation about how a diversity-affirming ethical orientation and an understanding of critical epistemology might guide institutional decision making in community colleges in the direction of social justice. The chapter begins with a conceptual overview of the terms…

The paper discusses report of The Spellings Commission for Future of Higher Education that was set up to look into the issues facing the higher education system in the U.S., outline the challenges and offer recommendations to tackle the problems. Most importantly, The Spellings Commission Report raised the issue of the role of federal government…

The condition of higher education is an important indicator of a nation's competitiveness in the modern knowledge-based world economy. Higher education builds up a nation's human resources by equipping students with advanced knowledge, professional skills, and critical and creative thinking ability. Higher education institutions are significant,…

Affirmative action in higher education remains a controversial topic in the US today, as it is tied in directly with citizens' varying conceptions of the larger society, and the importance of racial and other differences (in particular, socioeconomic class) in individual experiences and outcomes. This essay examines different arguments for and…

California's three-tier public postsecondary system is meant to provide equal access to higher education for all students in the state. Yet even though Latina/os will soon make up the majority of students in K-12 education, the enrollment of Latina/os in the state's postsecondary institutions remains low. When compared to the percentage of…

This paper draws on a four-year longitudinal ESRC funded project examining learning experiences of disabled students in higher education in four universities. The focus here is on institutional responses to the demands of audit culture and legislation in relation to making reasonable adjustments for students with impairments. The data comes from…

Changes in affirmative action policies in some states create possibilities for "natural experiments" to observe the effect of public policy on racial and ethnic inequality in American society. This study measured the impact of Initiative 200, a ballot measure that eliminated affirmative action in Washington State, on the transition from…

The People's Republic of China has seen a dramatic growth in its economy in recent years. It has a rapidly increasing population of approximately 1.2 billion people, though the population is still largely rural with about 80% of people living outside urban areas. China in its Education Law (1995) restated its commitment to universal education. In…