Mass Higher Education and the Elitist Tradition: The English Experience

Britain, like most countries of Western Europe, is poised between elite and mass higher education. If we define elite higher education as education for the highest stratum of professionals, administrators, and managers, say the top 5 percent of jobholders, and mass higher education as education for the majority of the nonmanual occupations, say 35 percent of jobholders - as contrasted with universal higher education, for most of the occupied population, say 80 percent - then Britain, with about 15 percent of the relevant age group enrolled in higher education, is approaching the halfway mark between the two. In this it compares favorably with most Western European countries. In 1968-69 only Belgium (13.7 percent), Finland (14.0 percent), France (13.9 percent), and Sweden (16.9 percent) surpassed Britain (13.5 percent) in enrollment rates, and only Sweden by a substantial margin. But of course this fell far short of the mass higher education of Canada (28 percent) and the United States (35 percent). (1) If we add all the part-time day and evening students in British higher and further education, however, we should come much nearer to this figure. In 1973 there were 3,963,600 students in higher and further education, of whom only 716,000 were full-time (including "sandwich course") students. (2) The part-timers were of quite varying ages and cannot properly be compared with the 18-22 age group, but those among them who fall between these ages would probably raise the enrollment percentage of this group to 25 or more. Part-time mass higher education has already arrived.