Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution

This report (PDF) was prepared by Phillip G. Altbach, Liz Reisberg, and Laura Rumbley for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, July 2009. It's a 250-page monster of a PDF, downloadable for free. We urge you to consider the Executive Summary a must-read document for a great analytical background on global higher education trends.

Much of this report is concerned with the ways in which higher education has responded to the challenge of massification. The "logic" of massification is inevitable and includes greater social mobility for a growing segment of the population, new patterns of funding higher education, increasingly diversified higher education systems in most countries, generally an overall lowering of academic standards, and other tendencies. Like many of the trends addressed in this report, while massification is not a new phase, at this "deeper stage" of ongoing revolution in higher education it must be considered in different ways. At the first stage, higher education systems struggled just to cope with demand, the need for expanded infrastructure and a larger teaching corps. During the past decade systems have begun to wrestle with the implications of diversity and to consider which subgroups are still not being included and appropriately served.