Higher Education has become a central institution of society, building individual knowledge, skills, agency, and relational social networks at unprecedented depth and scale. Within a generation there has been an extraordinary global expansion of Higher Education, in every region in all but the poorest countries, outstripping economic growth and deriving primarily from familial aspirations for betterment. By focusing on the systems and countries that have already achieved near universal participation, High Participation Systems of Higher Education explores this remarkable transformation.

The world enrolment ratio, now rising by 10 per cent every decade, is approaching 40 per cent, mostly in degree-granting institutions, including three quarters of young people in North America and Europe. Higher Education systems in the one in three countries that enrol more than 50 per cent are here classified as 'high participation systems'.

Part I of the book measures, maps, and explains the growth of participation, and the implications for society and Higher Education itself. Drawing on a wide range of literature and data, the chapters theorize the changes in governance, institutional diversity, and stratification in Higher Education systems, and the subsequent effects in educational and social equity. The theoretical propositions regarding high-participation Higher Education developed in these chapters are then tested in the country case studies in Part II, presenting a comprehensive enquiry into the nature of the emerging 'high participation society'.

About the Author:
Brendan Cantwell, Associate Professor, Michigan State University, Simon Marginson, Professor of International Higher Education, and Director of ESRC/HEFCE Centre for Global Higher Education, University College London, Anna Smolentseva, Senior Researcher, National Research University Higher School of Economics

Dr Brendan Cantwell
Brendan Cantwell is an associate professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education in Michigan State University's Department of Educational Administration. His research, which has been published in a variety of journals and books, addresses the political economy of higher education. Dr Cantwell is a co-editor of The Handbook of Politics of Higher Education (with Hamish Coates and Roger King) and is a Coordinating Editor for the journal Higher Education.

Professor Simon Marginson
Simon Marginson is Professor of International Higher Education at the UCL Institute of Education at University College London in the UK, Director of the ESRC/HEFCE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), and Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education. CGHE is a government-research partnership of five UK and eight international universities with 16 projects on global, national, and local aspects of higher education. Professor Marginson's research and published scholarship are focused on the global and international dimensions of higher education, on national system dynamics, and on higher education and social equality.

Dr Anna Smolentseva
Anna Smolentseva is a senior researcher at the Institute of Education, National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She is a sociologist who works on the changing role of higher education in societies, educational inequality, and transformations in post-socialist higher education systems. Dr Smolentseva received a PhD in sociology from Moscow State University. She has been a recipient of a US National Academy of Education/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship, Fulbright New Century Scholar grant, and a visiting scholar at the CSHPE at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is an author of a number of publications in Russian and English.