The Four Perspectives of Higher Education Policy Explained
Dec 5, 2018Jay SchalinJay Schalin 12 Comments
Explaining higher education policy is never easy (even to people who are involved in it). Over the years, while training young writers for the Martin Center, I have come up with a model that has proven useful. One way to produce clarity among the confusion is to apply a model having four basic perspectives rather than just two.
One major problem the model overcomes is the tendency to reflexively think about policy according to the left-right political paradigm. It’s not that higher education is not political—it is among the most politicized institutions in our society, the central battleground of the culture war.
But the standard left-right political model is inadequate or misleading for discussing higher education policy. There are too many non-political dynamics at play; perhaps the most important of these is an unstable economy centered on knowledge that has added a new range of higher education controversies on top of longstanding political ones.
Nor does the liberal model in which there is a corporate takeover of the academy work. Higher education is simply too complex for that explanation.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/12/the-four-perspectives-of-higher-education-policy-explained/
