This publication takes up the challenge of describing and analyzing the internal and external dynamics of United States higher education policy with regard to three global and often conflicting goals of higher education policy: quality, diversity, and efficiency. The issue of diversity, on the one hand, which covers many others, such as access, participation, equity and opportunity, is indeed the oldest among these goals and was a predominant objective of public policy over the long period of expansion of higher education in the United States after the Second World War. The themes of quality and budgetary efficiency, on the other, have both more recently moved up on the political agenda within a context of increasing globalization of markets and international competition, tightness of public budgets, and changes in the political, social, and economic climates. The book aims at pointing out critical issues in the tensions that exist among these basic policy options and tries to give some direction and recommendations for future priority setting in higher education.
The publication is in fact a collection of discussion papers presented in October 1988 at the College of William and Mary on the interaction of public policy and higher education. Fourteen papers have been grouped together in five sections of which the first one sets the historical scene of higher education policy making in the United States. Changes in the interaction of federal and state involvement in higher education policy are discussed. From a rather limited and haphazard involvement of government in higher education policy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the federal government has become massively involved in need-based student aid and research subsidization from the seventies onwards without being able, however, to embrace institutional financing. The states on the contrary, traditionally in charge of institutional support, have started to supplement federal student aid over the seventies.
The second section, dealing with the interaction of public policy and the quality of higher education, is indeed the most controversial issue among the three. The authors discuss thorny questions such as various perceptions of quality and related standards, instruments for the measurement of quality, as well as past state government initiatives for the enhancement of quality. All authors take a relativist view on quality, that is to judge the performance of an institution in relation to its particular role in the system and according to clearly defined institutional objectives. With regard to policy instruments for quality improvement, they recommend several devices ranging from financial incentives for institution-based quality control mechanisms and the strengthening of the market element in higher education, for instance, by means of a voucher system. In general, doubts are raised as to what extent public policy in the area of quality improvement can be tuned to the specificities of each institution so that it would not entail undesirable homogenization of standards among institutions.
The section on diversity focuses widely on the question as to what extent public student welfare has been effective in reducing sex and ethnic disparities in access, participation, and completion of college education.
