Higher education

Exactly because global civil society consists of a vast mosaic of socio-economic groups, organisations and initiatives that are variously related to governmental structures at the local, national, regional and supranational levels, its organisations and actors are pushed and pulled in various and often contradictory directions: not only towards and away from businesses and non-profit civic organisations, but also towards and away from governmental institutions. Government-funded systems of mass higher education – now linked together across borders by shared languages, common teaching and research methods, staff and student exchanges, and compatible hardware – illustrate well these messy, sometimes productive tensions built into government-enabled civil organisations.

During the past half-century, the role of governing institutions in fostering higher education has had spectacular effects. Driven by a variety of policy objectives and hunches – military capability, national pride, liberal beliefs in the importance of education, but above all by expectations that during coming decades perhaps half of all jobs in the post-industrial turbocapitalist economies will require a minimum of sixteen years' schooling and training – governments of all kinds in all continents have invested heavily in the business of higher education. The huge increase in the numbers of state-funded students on various patches of the earth has definitely helped to create an impression that higher education is a world-wide development. It is easy to see why.