A degree is a degree? The impact of elite universities on colleges offering degrees

The provision of bachelor degrees in technical and further education (TAFE) institutes in Australia, further education (FE) colleges in England, and community colleges (CCs) in Canada and the United States is caught in a contradiction. On the one hand, this provision offers opportunities to groups of students who are not having their needs met in universities (Floyd & Falconetti, 2013; Moodie et al., 2019; Webb et al., 2017; Wheelahan et al., 2009). On the other hand, the emergence of this provision over the last twenty years is part of the further stratification and hierarchical structuring of higher education in those countries (Bathmaker, 2016; Wheelahan, 2016). This prologue argues that TAFE, FE and CCs are kept firmly in their place at the bottom of the higher education hierarchy in their respective countries. While the provision of degrees in colleges seems to offer ‘college for all’ and to reflect and support democratic impulses and social justice objectives in liberal democracies, its location in the sectoral hierarchy means that this provision helps to reproduce social inequality. This contradiction reflects the ‘messiness and complexity’ of HE in FE (or TAFE or CCs) identified by Avis and Orr (2016, p. 61) because while it cannot alter existing structures of disadvantage, it can and does transform lives of individual students by providing them with access to the kind of knowledge they need to be citizens in their occupations and in society.