Access, Equity, and Capacity in Asia-Pacific Higher Education

Higher education is growing most rapidly in the Asia-Pacific region, and policy makers are facing the task of balancing quality and quantity. This book will help readers understand the current situation of higher education not only in this region but everywhere that they may work.
The rapid spread of global interdependence has been marked by various paradoxes. One is that as global wealth has increased over the past three decades, so has its inequality of distribution. Another is the creation within the large countries of the developing world of a “two cultures” society consisting of those within the society – often aggregated into sprawling urban conurbations, megacities – who are possessed of jobs and lifestyles tied to the leading edge of their emergent knowledge societies, and those whose lives are barely touched by the wealth and innovations of such societies – those often termed the left behind. In these conditions of rapid development and the pressing demands to deal with both historic patterns of inequality and those generated by increasing global interdependence, societies throughout the world turn to education as a tool for both development and equity. Particularly within the Asia-Pacific region the expansion of higher education, especially when it has taken the form of rapid massification, brings to the center of policy discourse government efforts to develop effective policies concerned with how higher education can develop greater capacity such that it can provide access to a larger segment of the population within an abiding context of equity.

This book addresses these issues from a variety of conceptual perspectives and through the lenses of different national experiences.

For more information on this publication please click the following link: www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx