Book review of "Twentieth-Century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal"

Abstract

This book contains 17 essays in chapter format, written by Martin Trow between 1974 and 2006, originally published in a variety of journals and books. The chapters are introduced by scholars and former students who collaborated in one way or another with Trow over the span of his long and productive life as a social scientist and public intellectual. Among them are internationally renowned scholars such as Oliver Fulton, Roger Geiger, Nathan Glazer, Chelly Halsey, Guy Neave, and Ulrich Teichler. Michael Burrage, a British sociologist, contributes an informative and not entirely uncritical introduction to the volume. The essays necessarily neglect some themes with which Trow dealt but are, on the whole, a representative selection. Chapter 1 addresses the topic of upper secondary education (high schools), the feeding system for higher education, and its transformation from an elite to a mass system, a theme central in his later work on post-secondary education. All the other chapters concern various manifestations and perspectives of this transition in a three-tiered system of higher education. Although he occasionally mentioned the Canadian higher education system, Trow took no particular interest in it except to point out that it is a federal system, like the American one, but otherwise more like an extension of the European rather than the U.S. model because it is publicly regulated and financed. This reviewer, who had the chance to participate in some of the 1980s in the Berkeley Centre's weekly brown-bag seminars, was therefore not surprised when Trow, invited twice to British Columbia in the 1990s by UBC's Centre for Policy Studies in Education (now Centre for Policy Studies in Higher Education and Training), argued that the system that had been in place until the end of the 1980s in British Columbia (and the rest of Canada), namely a two-tiered system of degree-granting universities and non-degree community colleges, was insufficient to meet the growing demand for degree studies and for increased access and greater choice among programs. The example and experience of California's three-tiered system was of great interest in Victoria and Vancouver (where the two seminars were held) since British Columbia, in order to resolve one of the province's most urgent educational problems, access to post-secondary education, had just set up (in 1989) a third, middle layer of higher education institutions by creating four (and later five) university colleges, a type of institution hitherto unknown in Canada (excepting a single one in Cape Breton). It is worth noting that, in the meantime, this middle layer of higher education institutions has been abolished in British Columbia-a development on which one would wish to have Martin Trow's comment.