"GLOBAL: Trends in global higher education"

Source: Karen MacGregor, University World News, July 5, 2009

'Key drivers of a 21st century academic 'revolution' are identified in a trend report produced for this week's UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education.....

'The central reality of the past half century has been the massification of higher education. While some countries called for or achieved mass access in the first half of the 20th century, globally it is a quite recent phenomenon. And although some developing countries still have fewer than 10% of the post-school age group in higher education, almost all have dramatically increased their participation rates.

''The 'logic' of massification is inevitable and includes an overall lowering of academic standards, greater social mobility for a growing segment of the population, new patterns of funding higher education, increasingly diversified higher education systems in most countries and other tendencies,' says the report.'