Search

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, two new universities and more than ten regional colleges were founded in Norway. In addition, more than 100 schools and colleges have been upgraded to higher education institutions in recent years, signifying a strong emphasis on decentralisation. Lately, however, this emphasis has shown signs of weakening while at the same time the classical universities have come back into the limelight. Recent constraints on public spending have obviously influenced these changes. Though rich in oil and energy, Norway has increasingly been unable to remain immune from international economic difficulties. Besides curtailing further expansion of higher education, this climate of concern has led to a renewed interest in the contribution of higher education to national economic well-being. A recent government commission pointed to education and research at the universities as important instruments for improving Norway's technical and industrial capabilities and international competitiveness. No major planning document or White Paper on higher education has been published since the early 1970s, and in the last few years the sector, has attracted little public attention or controversy, though the Social Democrats' recent proposals for extended access to higher education as well as for more expensive student loans are notable exceptions. In the last Long-Term Programme, the previous government announced the publication of a White Paper on higher education in the next fouryear planning period (1982-85). With the Social Democrats losing the 1981 parliamentary election, however, and a conservative government taking office for the first time in 50 years, some policy changes in this area are perhaps to be expected. Since 1975, enrolment figures have increased in the non-university part of higher education while remaining at a virtually constant level in the universities. An increase in the percentage of female students as well as a greater influx of older students-many with substantial work experience-have considerably changed the composition of the student body in most institutions. Furthermore, the degree structure has been revised, most significantly at graduate level where an AngloAmerican type of doctorate has been introduced in several fields of study. (Career opportunities at the universities have often been limited, and 'aging without newcomers' has been the rule in many university departments (Skoie, 1976). Even so, there are shortages of qualified applicants for academic posts in

This article, serving as an introduction to four other papers on current problems of higher education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia, could have several alternative (and perhaps more appropriate) subtitles: 'How to return to Europe?', 'The impossible task', 'Can it succeed?', 'Coping with a paralysing heritage', and the like. They would all express more or less adequately what might be called the common denominator of current or desirable (and indispensable) renewal or reform of higher education in Central and Eastern Europe. The terms 'issues and challenges' are undoubtedly less expressive and more neutral, hence their utilisation here. The present article, it should be stressed, is not based on an extensive research effort, nor on a thorough survey of the literature. The sources are essentially the other papers published in this issue, several visits to the four countries covered by these papers, including discussions with numerous individuals there, drawn from the academic world and ministries, as well as a few 'brainstorming' meetings with Western and Central European specialists in higher education. Analysis of developments in higher education in Central Europe [1] is virgin territory, which does not imply that excellent specialists in this area do not exist, in both the West and in Central Europe. They are not numerous, and their work (especially that of the ones living in the region) is not widely known in the West. A completely new situation has, however, arisen since 1989 [2]: data to which hardly anyone had had access suddenly became available; opinions can be expressed and confronted freely in public meetings and seminars; highly critical assessments can be published. Obviously most of the serious scholars on both sides have not had sufficient time nor the necessary resources to cope with this situation. Hopefully the gaps will start to be filled in the near future. In the meantime, the present article and this whole issue of the European Journal of Education are principally intended to contribute to the beginning of a more systematic process of analysis of higher education development in Central Europe.

Articulation is the point at which the anatomist and the sociologist each goes his separate way. To the former, it is the point at which the most unkind cuts are made. To the latter, it is that locus where two processes interact with one another. To the sociologist of education who, lacking the equivalent of Grey's Anatomy, must work less incisively, the concept of articulation has a third meaning: that point where two levels of the education system interlink. It is here that the institutional role of schooling, the type of knowledge purveyed, the structure of qualifications available and, finally, the composition of the student body are radically re-defined. This paper is concerned with two such points of articulation. The first is that between secondary school and higher education in general; the second lies between the different sectors within higher education, broadly speaking between the university stricto sensu and other types of higher education that go to make up the non-university sector. The main burden of argument is that the advent of 1992 coincides with major change in the relationship both between secondary and higher education as well as between the different segments within higher education itself. Such change is not simply a question of numbers. It also involves what might be interpreted as a relative destabilisation in the vertical relationship between secondary and higher education. Such 'destabilisation' has little to do with demography although, in the North Sea Member States, its effect may well be to make predictions of 'take-up' of higher education amongst qualified secondary-school leavers even more difficult to estimate [1]. Throughout this paper a distinction will be drawn between 'vertical articulation', i.e. the process of moving from school-age education or training to higher education, and 'horizontal articulation', i.e. cross-linkages between the university and the nonuniversity sectors. That said, 1992 and its consequences will have their impact on existing structures and practices in both the 'vertical' and the 'horizontal' domains of articulation. It is important, then, to grasp the broad lines of development that have introduced a high degree of instability within them.

The publication of the British government's official White Paper, Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge, in April 1987 (DES, 1987a) pointed to a forthcoming major restructuring of the relationship between the state and higher education. The White Paper made numerous proposals, but the most significant were that the University Grants Committee (UGC) should be replaced by a University Funding Council, and the far newer National Advisory Body for Public Sector Higher Education (NAB) be replaced by a similar Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council. In both cases this change of nomenclature indicates the increased involvement of industrialists and other non-academics in higher education planning, and changes in the extent and method of government support. Under the proposed schemes, the block grants to the higher education institutions will be abolished and replaced by multiple contractual agreements between individual institutions and the relevant Council for both teaching and research. The intention is that accountability for the use of public funds will thus be sharpened, and that the institutions become more efficient through competition for contracts in an open market. The institutions will also be encouraged to seek contracts from other sources and thus reduce their present dependence on public funding. The proposals in the White Paper signal dramatic changes in higher education. However, this watershed for higher education is part of a major restructuring of the whole of the British education system, which is to be initiated through the very wideranging 1987 Education Reform Bill, currently working its way through parliament (DES, 1987g). The details of the Bill are at present open to parliamentary amendment, but the huge majority which the present Conservative government enjoys will ensure that the main thrust of the resulting 1988 Education Act will remain much as is now intended. At the school level, the Act aims to give greater choice of schools to parents of pupils in maintained schools it will establish a core curriculum to be followed by all maintained schools, with regular testing of all pupils according to expected national standards of achievement at four separate ages; it will allow schools to make charges for some non-compulsory 'extras'; it will give far greater financial delegation to individual schools and greater powers to governing bodies; it will pave the way for the dismantling of the Inner London Education Authority; and, in what is the most dramatic change, will allow the possibility of individual schools opting out of local education authority ownership and control to become one of a new group of directly government funded, semi-independent, grant-maintained schools, run by charitable trusts. This article concentrates on the plans for higher education, but it is argued that

This paper will explore issues associated with a trend in British government policy over the last decade of encouraging the integration of curricular and learning experiences associated with higher education (HE, conventionally identified as post-18 institutions offering higher level award-bearing courses) with the practices associated with the workplace. The analysis will centre on the current initiative called Work-Based Learning (WBL), but will examine a range of issues which flow from developing more explicit links between HE and employment. The focus will not be on the employment of graduates but on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes which are based on learning in the workplace with varying degrees of emphasis. In this vein, it will first examine the idea of integration in the context of government interest in this policy orientation. It will discuss the extent to which the learning contexts of the workplace equate with the practices associated with learning in HE and the implications of developing an approach to validation which is based on competencies. It will draw on recent evaluation work which focuses on the idea of 'professional' learning and it will identify some emerging issues in the critical commentaries on current government initiatives in the accreditation of work-based learning and competence.

The main purpose of this paper is to work through some seemingly specifically Austrian issues in the relationship between higher education and employment. When compared with the situation in other countries, such issues may either turn out to be more common than expected or cut some new paths in interpreting the relationship between higher education and employment. These specific issues are as follows (for further information, see also BMWF & BMUK, 1992, especially Ch. Al, pp. 36-42 and Ch. B4, pp. 155-163)

Every now and then, at times of rising unemployment, the debate on the labour market position of the better educated in the Netherlands intensifies. When many graduates have difficulty finding work, overeducation is readily put forward as an explanation, and the debate about the effects of educational expansion on the labour market starts anew. Pessimists argue that such expansion leads to unemployment of overqualified workers. Optimists stress that an increase in the number of years of education is necessary to achieve innovation in the economic system. In this article we reconstruct the main arguments in the debate as hypotheses. Furthermore, we will use the available data to explore their empirical validity. At the end of the paper, we speculate about the impact of recent changes in the Dutch system of higher education on the labour market position of its graduates.

Anyone involved in comparative education will have experienced visits to another country which, seen from afar, seems to have avoided all the pitfalls into which one's own is plunging. On arrival, however, one's eager questions are met with a litany of complaints and problems. One's hosts excoriate their own current practices, and instead want to learn more about the policies one has left behind. How, they want to know, might they quarry them for export? Last November I had a similar experience during a one-day conference, organised for British policy-makers, officials and academics by the International Centre for Research on Assessment. The particular focus was how far parity of esteem between academic and vocational awards is ever attainable, and how far current government commitments to such parity amount to anything more than rhetoric. A number of the papers which appear in this issue' were first presented at that meeting (and are also published by the Centre as part of the conference Proceedings.) The purpose was to look broadly at current European developments, by going beyond France and Germany-the usual subject of English interest-and offering a more general historical perspective on current change. What became obvious during the day, however, was how far all the national systems represented were experiencing the same challenges, how interested they all were in their neighbours' 'solutions' and how far any of them were from actually resolving their dilemmas. The impressions left by that day are strengthened by this wider picture. The future of vocational education is at issue throughout Europe. Governments find it nearly impossible to develop a coherent long-term policy-in large part because they are trying to achieve a number of quite separate objectives. They are attempting to compress into a single national system programmes which imply very different sorts of education and training, to reconcile individuals' interests and ambitions with wider social concerns and to do so in a situation of inherent

Government set the agenda for change in British higher education in the 1980s. Yet this policy has been a puzzle. For the first half of the decade, government policy could be described either as salutary blood-letting or as indiscriminate massacre of institutions which were seen as fat and self-satisfied defenders of traditional values. But the invective and expenditure cuts obscured the politicians' failure to enunciate a view of higher education consistent with the broader political doctrines they so forcefully proclaimed. Higher education was run, though indirectly and shamefacedly, by the criteria of central planning by governments which were committed to 'rolling back' the state. It was not until 1989 that students were identified as consumers and a formula was devised to bring them into a 'market' relationship with institutions of higher education. Governments in other European countries also sought efficiency in higher education in the 1980s and provided opportunities for initiative by individual institutions. Yet the 'market' approach, which the British Conservative government has finally adopted, seems to diverge sharply from the collectivist traditions which remain powerful in other Western European countries. The outcome of a divergent political philosophy, paradoxically, may bring a traditionally elitist higher education in Britain into the European mainstream by increasing student opportunities and choice. This paper will address three questions. What principles underly the relationship between government, public institutions and citizens in Conservative ideology and how far have these been applied to higher education, especially at the end of the 1980s? How far does this strategy confront the peculiar traditions and weaknesses of British higher education? How do they compare with approaches taken in other Western European countries, particularly in view of Europe-wide links in higher education?

Ever since those concerned with educational policy have become aware of its relationship to the so-called employment system, discussion on this theme has been dominated by the question of the need for graduates with specific educational degrees. Experts have based, and still base, their arguments and demands concerning educational policy on the necessities of the employment system. This is true both of the pioneers of educational expansion in the 1960s and of all those who now warn about an overproduction of university graduates. For example in the 1960s it was argued that if additional highly qualified personnel could not be made available, further economic growth would be arrested due to an insuperable bottleneck. Today, on the other hand, it is argued that a majority of university graduates is doomed to unemployment, since there is no place for them in the employment structure. In contrast, this paper contends that

At the risk of shocking my readers, I must, as must many of my French colleagues, confess to a deep perplexity about the title of this paper. Is the word 'reforms', or even the concept of reform, appropriate to the tragedy with which French higher education has been plagued, since the spring of 1983? Some commentators are even speaking of it as a death-blow to the universities [1]. Even if their pessimism is clearly instigated, at least in part, by political opinions, their judgement should not be disqualified since they are authoritative politicians from academia. France has been involved in the enactment of a new law called the Savary Law (Mr Savary is the present Minister of Education), which was voted at the end of 1983 after a highly controversial debate within the Assemblee Nationale and the Senate [2]. Although the majority of the Senate was opposed to it because of its political composition the French Constitution gives the last word to the Assemblde Nationale provided that the law remains in accordance with constitutional rules. The text has raised scattered street protests from various groups of students. It has raised unanimous hostility among the intellectual establishment from both the right and the left. Raymond Barre, the late Raymond Aron [3], the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences have expressed, not surprisingly, their criticisms. But great intellectuals and scholars, well known for their left-wing political convictions, have also clearly condemned the initiative taken by the socialist-communist government. M. Duverger, L. Schwartz [4], A. Touraine, E. Leroy-Ladurie are among others who have publicly demonstrated their disapproval of what they consider to be the deleterious higher education policy this law will entail. The 1968 Faure Law on higher education can be considered sympathetically as a genuine achievement because, after all, it tried to respond to the dissatisfactions of hundreds of thousands of students. It was oriented to youth interests, and inspired by youth dreams. The 1983 initiative, in spite of its appearances, is inspired by the vested interests of unionised and highly politicised junior faculties. It cannot claim the same sympathy. The 1968 orientation law was voted in unanimously by the Assemblee Nationale, except for six communist representatives who abstained whereas the 1983 law has been voted in unanimously by the left-wing majority in Parliament and unanimously rejected by the opposition. This clearly means that the whole higher education question is nowadays a politically biased issue and does not offer an opportunity for bipartisan agreement. Fifty-five distinguished senior professors followed by 1000 of

In a recent paper [1], the law professor Stig Stromholm at present Pro-rector of Uppsala University-drew attention to the consequences for medieval society, and for contemporary western culture, of the great numbers of law students trained at the universities of the Middle Ages. The French historian Regine Pernoud gives good examples [2] of this penetration juridique and its importance for the structure and values of the emerging French state in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Today, it is not unreasonable to ask questions about the penetration sstentifique which is a consequence of the enormous growth of science-based higher education. Critical reflection may show that there are good reasons why higher education should build not only on scientific traditions but on other traditions as well. Experiences from the Swedish higher education reform, which has been in the course of implementation since 1977, may serve as a convenient point of departure for some remarks of this kind. Swedish higher education covers a wide field and includes, in the terminology used since 1977, all types of post-secondary training, such as that of musicians, preschool teachers, and nurses. About half those admitted to full study programmes, the total of which corresponds to one-third of all 20-year-olds, are within what might be labelled traditional academic studies. The establishment of the present structure was the outcome of an effort to meet the problems of planning related to admission, location, the organisation of studies, and the governance of higher education in the welfare state. In the period of almost explosive expansion (the 1960s) there was both a tremendous demand for graduates and a strong pressure for admission to higher studies. Issues of manpower planning cam to the forefront of policy interest [3]. In quantitative terms, a balance was sought between what was at that time an open admission sector and the numerus clausus sector of the university system, and between both university and non-university post-secondary education. The solution was the present comprehensive organisation that aims at meeting the needs of qualified training for very varied groups of students. Not only are secondary school graduates eligible for higher studies but also adults with work experience who meet certain specific qualifications. Open admission has been abandoned: selection among applicants is computerised and its criteria do not differentiate between the various study programmes. Exception is made only for training in the performing arts. Studies are organised according to principles of gradual differentiation and in accumulated credit units. Except in Stockholm and to a certain extent in Goteborg, all State higher education is organised in one institution in each place. This means

It is difficult to review developments in Dutch education in the field of information technology and the related policy formulation. The scene is characterised by smallscale research projects, an explosion of grass-roots developments and of private initiatives in recent years, and by the absence so far of a government policy for the use of computers in schools. Recently, however, there have been moves towards a national policy, with a former Cabinet's White Paper, 'Education and Information Technology: a framework for policy' [1], presented to Parliament in September 1982. However, as this is still awaiting discussion, together with two advisory reports [2] and a study of policies in six other industrial countries [3], it remains hard to gauge the extent of future political support for a national policy of this kind. Since in all countries, the educational system and its financing largely define the scope of such a policy, both merit brief consideration. A Dutch pupil usually leaves primary education at the age of 12, before choosing between different forms of secondary education. Although the first year at secondary level is often organised as a transition class, after that year a choice of school type (general or vocational) has to be made. However, in January 1982, the former Ministry of Education and Science announced a plan for reforming lower secondary education into a comprehensive school, called continued primary education. The outcome of this plan is uncertain and will mostly depend on the policy adopted by the new cabinet but, come what may, computer literacy is included as a subject area in the comprehensive school proposals. At present, educational practice with regard to computers differs in all types of secondary and higher education. In schools of the same type practices may also diverge. Schools are free to a large extent to arrange their own curricula. Private education, with its own curriculum, is common in the Netherlands. These private schools are either based on religious convictions-catholic (37%) or protestant (25%)-or other (e.g. non-religious pedagogical) principles (11%), as in neutral Montessori, Dalton and Jena schools [4]. Consequently, the system is, as regards the curriculum, characterised by a strong sectoral autonomy [5] vested in four sectors alongside the autonomy of the individual schools. The fourth sector, state education (i.e. that provided by central or local government) and the three private sectors have, since 1917, all been

In asking Professor Borye Holmberg to wnte this keynote paper, I believe that I have found one of the most advanced thinkers and prolific wnters in European Distance Education. Professor Holmberg has a wide and interesting background. He has been Director General of the prestigzous Swedish Distance Education organisation, Hermods, and is currently Professor of the Methodology of Distance Education at the FernUniversitat, Hagen in West Germany. He is internationally known, having consulted in most of the continents of the world, and is a Past President of the International Council for Distance Education. He has written several books on the subject, is a Knight both of the Swedish Order of Vasa and of the Finnish Order of the White Rose, and has Honorary Doctoratesfirom the UK Open University and Deakin University in Australia.

Changing employment patterns and austerity affect cultural and curricular content in an educational system. Considering Thorstein Veblen's dictum that "... higher learning takes its character from the manner of life enforced on the groups by the circumstances in which it is placed" this paper looks briefly at Europe and the USA and narrates both the conceptual and the statistical aspects of the shift. The general position was perhaps best enunciated for the USA in the Newman Report on higher education [1] from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It puts forth "skills and training" as the ends of college education, i.e. the direct products of cognitive investment, whereas the process products of a college education emerge as the most important outcomes in a slightly later study [2] by Talcott Parsons and Gerald Platt, who held that graduate training and research are the core of the university where the commitment to cognitive rationality is translated into the canons of the various disciplines. The Newman Report, however, advocated that students be socialized to the world of work and be related to the university as a source of useable knowledge in place of the Parsonian socialization to rational modes of behaviour. For Parsons and Platt, courses should conform to the strict professional standards of academia; for Newman professionalism would be de-emphasized by the introduction of practitioner knowledge from the workplace. Elite institutions on the American scene are still likely to be governed by the demands of disciplinary inquiry. The middle ranks of universities, a central part of the "academic revolution" [3] portrayed by David Riesman and Christopher Jencks, and previously large gainers of academic, scholarly, research prestige are now dominated by instrumental, as opposed to disciplinary, knowledge and vocationalism. The Newman Report described, predicted and perhaps would have applauded what has happened to the middle-rank American universities, but it did not cause the change. The changing labour market, the austere economy and the cessation of growth in American higher education (demographic change) were the major factors. There has been, then, a general trend away from disciplinary majors in favour of instrumental subjects. This trend is especially noteworthy in view of steady decline in education majors. In the class of 1977, the business majors for the first time surpassed education as the largest category of graduates, comprising one of every six bachelor's degrees. The data in Table I showing change from 1964 to 1977 as a percentage of the total number of higher education students in the USA document this conclusion: 67

Teacher education, formerly a haven of quiet induction into the profession has been rudely pressed into the public realm. The adjustments in institutions of teacher preparation have been the response to fluctuations in the birth rate, increasing central government control and internal pressures to change the curriculum. A 'bulge' in the birth rate between 1956-64 required a massive expansion in student teacher places located mainly in the, then, 157 colleges of education. Between 1962 and 1972, the number of teacher education students doubled, reaching the peak of 114,000 in 1972. A Government enquiry (the James Report) into teacher education, issued in January 1972, referred to student numbers in its index, but that section of the report was not included. The news of the beginning of an average annual fall in birth rate in social classess III, IV and V of 6.6% was first reported, to my knowledge, in an article by Sir John Habakkuk (1975). The implications of this were probably included in the missing section from the James Report but in the December 1972 White Paper 'Education: a framework for expansion', the consequences were clear. The numbers were to fall to 75,000-85,000. Some colleges would reduce, some amalgamate, some would close. Institutions should be large enough (in practice more than 500 full-time students) to accommodate a range of courses of a satisfactory standard and be geographically accessible to part-time students as well as enabling an increasing population of full-time students to reside at home. Thus 25 were closed, 27 reorganised, and the remainder merged with polytechnics, colleges of further education, universities or each other (Locke & Burgess, 1985; Lynch, 1979; Hencke, 1978; Taylor, 1984), while 59 remained intact, changing their title to colleges of higher education. By 1981 only 35,000 students were preparing to become teachers. In 1985/86 the approximate total of 26,500 students were in teacher preparation. In the university sector 4450 were prepared by the post-graduate certificate of education (3825 secondary and 625 primary) and by the B.Ed and B.Sc teachers' diploma, approximately 1000 secondary and 750 primary; in the public sector, on the B.Ed total of 16,536, of which primary was 12,802, secondary 3734; on the postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), 3781, of which 2088 were secondary and 1693 primary. Another bulge in the birth rate in the early 1980s has required an expansion of places. Two ways of accommodating these fluctuations have been pressed by central government: in colleges of higher education a diversified (mainly arts and humanities) curriculum, which would be expanded or reduced inversely to the supply of (mostly) primary teachers; in universities, the use of the one-year, and so rapidly adjustable. PGCE to prepare secondary teachers. Before proceeding with this intriguing, painful