Posts Tagged Markets
The Uneasy Public Policy Triangle in Higher Education: Quality, Diversity, and Budgetary Efficiency
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.
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Employment Futures: Reorganization, Dislocation, and Public Policy.
The reviewer, Alfred Diamant, is a professor of political science and West European studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
This work will not attract a wide readership. It should, however, for it deals with one of the more intractable problems of the U.S. political economy. Moreover, Osterman examines crucial issues of the American educational system by stressing links among that system, its outputs, and the labor market. He does so in good part by a careful comparative study of labor-market functioning in Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany.
The reason this book will not get the readership it deserves is twofold. It is a book for specialists, so that even social scientists fluent in other branches of these disciplines, such as this reviewer, find the going tough. Readability is further reduced by an uncompromisingly tight focus on the issues, with little effort to lighten the nonspecialist reader’s task. At the same time, the author works hard at summarizing preceding arguments and taking the reader over terrain that had previously been covered in the book. These might seem to be contradictory complaints, but they are not; the summarizing of earlier arguments is just as difficult to manage as their original presentation.
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