POLICY REVIEWS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: EDITORIAL, Volume 7, Issue 2, September 2023

Abstract

Current social, economic and political transformations mean that radical thinking is required about how post-secondary education is structured, governed, funded, and delivered (Hazelkorn 2023). This is driving many countries to reframe their policy discussions around tertiary education as a coherent system, rather than separating higher education from other forms of postsecondary education. What does this mean for research that seeks to investigate the connections and relationships, the complementarities and conflicts between these sectors? What research is needed to provide an evidence base for policymakers, funders, institutions and educationalists seeking to pursue this rethinking of postsecondary education? How should we evaluate current attempts to reformulate tertiary education and the lessons they may yield for future efforts? One way of framing this would be to develop the concept of tertiary ecosystemsmade up of subsystems that are – to a greater or lesser degree – coherent, collaborative, co-ordinated and co-produced. This would embrace the entire post-secondary landscape as one in which different types of education, training, and research and innovation actors interact with each other in formal, informal, and non-formal arrangements which are, to a greater or lesser extent, mutually and societally beneficial and interdependent. Such ecosystems are dynamic spaces in which the number, type, role, and responsibilities of participants, individually and collectively, evolve and modify over time in response to the changing environment. This concept might encourage the exploration of the interconnections and interdependencies – as well as the disconnects and dysfunctionalities – of particular tertiary education ecosystems as they have developed over time. It can help to understand planned systems, such as the Californian hierarchy of elite research universities, mid-ranking universities and open community colleges, and binary systems, where two distinct university and non-university sectors have developed largely independently of each other. Equally, it can help to comprehend more diverse and differentiated arrangements especially if their various elements have been allowed to evolve in ad hoc and even haphazard ways. It can also help to explore the articulation of specific tertiary education systems with other domains, in particular, secondary education and relevant employment sectors and labour markets. Such rethinking could help to counter the ghettoisation of postsecondary education research, which has tended to emphasise the differences between sectors, focusing on the borderlines, boundary-making, tiers and barriers between them. It might also challenge the supremacy of higher education, universities and research institutions over vocational, technical and further education sectors, and the different value that is ascribed to research into these subsystems. This requires us to rethink traditional and dominant understandings of knowledge and skills formation, and the role of, and contributions to, research and innovation, which tend