by Anna Mountford-Zimdars, Louise Ashley, Eve Worth, and Chris Playford
Higher education has become the go-to solution for social inequality over the past three decades. Widening access and enhancing graduate outcomes have been presented as ways to generate upward mobility and ensure fairer life chances for people from all backgrounds. But what if the very ecosystem designed to level the playing field also inadvertently helps sustain the very inequalities we are hoping to overcome?
Social mobility agendas appear progressive but are often regressive in practice. By focusing on the movement of individuals rather than structural change, they leave wealth and income disparities intact. A few people may rise, but the wider system remains unfair – but now dressed up with a meritocratic veneer. We explore these issues in our new article in the British Journal of Sociology, ‘Ambivalent Agents: The Social Mobility Industry and Civil Society under Neoliberalism in England’. We examined the role of the UK’s ‘social mobility industry’: charities, foundations, and third-sector organisations primarily working with universities to identify ‘talented’ young people from less advantaged backgrounds and help them access higher education or elite careers. We were curious – are these organisations transforming opportunity structures and delivering genuine change, or do they help stabilise the present system?
The answer to this question is of course complex but, in essence, we found the latter. Our analysis of 150 national organisations working in higher education since the early 1990s found that organisations tend to reflect the individualistic approach outlined above and blend critical rhetoric about inequality with delivery models that are funder-compatible, metric-led and institutionally convenient. Thus – and we expect unintentionally on part of the organisations – they often perform inclusion of ‘talent’ without asking too many uncomfortable structural questions about the persistence and reproduction of unequal opportunities.
We classified organisations in a five-part typology. Most organisations fell into the category of Pragmatic Progressives: committed to fairness but shaped by funder priorities, accountability metrics, and institutional convenience. A smaller group acted as Structural Resistors, pushing for systemic change. Others were System Conformers, largely reproducing official rhetoric. The Technocratic deliverers were most closely integrated with the state, often functioning as contracted agents with managerial, metrics-focused delivery models. Finally, Professionalised Reformers seek reform through evidence-based programmes and advocacy, often with a focus on elite education and professions.
This finding matters beyond higher education. Civil society – the world of charities, voluntary groups, and associations – has long been seen as the sphere where resistance to inequality might flourish. Yet our findings show that many organisations are constrained or co-opted into protecting the status quo by limited budgets, demanding funders, and constant requirements to demonstrate ‘impact’. Our point is not to disparage gains or to criticise the intentions of the charity sector but to push for honest and genuine change.
Labour’s new Civil Society Covenant, which promises to strengthen voluntary organisations and reduce short-termism, could create opportunities. But outsourcing responsibility for social goods to arm’s-length actors also risks producing symbolic reforms that celebrate individual success stories without changing the odds for the many. If higher education is to deliver genuine fairness, we must distinguish between performing fairness for a few and redistributing opportunities for the many. We thus want to conclude by suggesting three practical actions for universities, access and participation teams, and regulators such as the Office for Students.
Audit for Ambivalence
Using our typology, do you find you are working with a mix of organisations, or mainly those focused on individuals? (Please contact us for accessing our coding framework to support your institutional or regional audits.)
Rebalance activity towards structural levers
Continue high-quality outreach, but, where possible, shift resources towards systemic interventions such as contextual admissions with meaningful grade floors, strong maintenance support, foundation pathways with guaranteed progression and fair, embedded work placements
Ask the regulator to measure structural outcomes as well as individual ones, at sector and regional levels. When commissioning work, ask for participatory governance and community accountability and measure that too.
We believe civil-society partnerships can play a vital role – but not if they become the sole heavy-lifter or metric of success. Universities are well positioned to embrace structural levers, protect space for critique, and hold themselves accountable for distributional outcomes. If this happens, the crowded charity space around social mobility could become a vibrant counter-movement for genuine change to opportunities and producing fairness rather than a prop for maintaining an unequal status quo.
In terms of research, our next step is speaking directly to people working in the ‘social mobility industry.’ Do they/you recognise the tensions we highlight? How do they navigate them? Have we fairly presented their work? We look forward to continuing the discussion on this topic and how to enhance practice for transformative change.
Anna Mountford-Zimdars is a Professor in Education at the University of Exeter.
Louise Ashley is Associate Professor in the School of business and management at Queen Mary University London.
Eve Worth is a Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter.
Christopher James Playford is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter.
Hamish Coates, Ellen Hazelkorn, Hans de Wit, Tessa Delaquil, and Angel Calderon
Hans de Wit, Ellen Hazelkorn and Hamish Coates are editors and Tessa DeLaquil is associate editor of Policy Reviews in Higher Education. Angel Calderon is a member of the PRiHE Editorial Board. This blog is based on their editorial for issue 2, 2025.
It often feels like there is lots more ranting and moaning than imagining and evidencing around higher education these days. With excellent policy research, it does not have to be this way.
The immediate post-millennium era was arguably a golden age for universities, with huge interest in massification, investment, especially in research, and institutional autonomy. But the global financial crisis followed a decade later by global pandemic shocked higher education into different worlds. Most countries still promulgate objectives for a sustainable and cost-efficient, equitable and accessible, high quality education system as the basis for growth. In OECD countries, however, assumptions that massification would on its own provide opportunities for everyone with mechanisms for social inclusion and social mobility are being heavily questioned. In developing and emerging economies, the challenge is meeting demand and being able to absorb graduates. Yet, too many countries and research-focused universities keep chasing ‘quick prestige’, leaving others to put up with disproportionately lower funding, as well as poorer facilities, resources and opportunities.
Wealth and opportunity inequalities are increasingly greater within rather than between countries. At the same time, questions about educational outcomes such as employability, skills gaps and skills mismatches and over-qualification which have been long ignored by academic communities as irrelevant, are gaining public and policy traction. Governments and industries document the shift away from credentials towards greater focus on competencies – what people can do with what they know – and alternative accreditation processes.
A few large countries are in the foothills of a demographic cliff, while others are (currently) privileged by demand. Traditional public systems in many countries face an identity crisis and appear too sluggish to grasp new opportunities. Parts of the private subsector are progressively active and more responsive to the needs of diverse and older learners and to competency-based learning, micro-credentials and other forms of just-in-time learning. Accordingly, the private sector is the fastest growing segment of postsecondary education worldwide.
Countries vary considerably in their ability to cover costs associated with policy objectives due to revenue challenges and competitive demands elsewhere within society and the economy, alongside student and public unease about cost. Certain systems promote a laissez-faire or marketised approach whereby individual colleges and institutions (public and private) pursue their own agendas, while others grasp at opportunities for a more strategic state-led approach. Countries are beginning to examine the opportunities of a more joined-up post-secondary tertiary system (Hazelkorn, 2025). As Piketty has written, “it is access to skills and diffusion of knowledge that allow inequality to be reduced both within countries and at the international level” (2020: 534). But funding a mass system is very different from one catering to a small minority especially at a time when geopolitical/geoeconomic power shifts reshape the global landscape.
Deglobalisation and populist nationalism are shaking these issues out differently around the world. In many countries, these tensions are contributing to a growing sense of people and communities being left behind, and to social unrest. The dominance of information technology over universities, challenging the value of graduates for entry-level work and of faculty, will spur heightened questioning of the value of higher education (Coates, 2017; The Guardian, 2025; Roose, 2025). While others look on in disbelief, there is a sense that this may not be a problem for higher education today, though it is likely to be so one day.
It is too easy to blame governments and other external stakeholders. What role has higher education played itself, and what role can it play into the future? Is the sector, especially the public side, sufficiently strategic, forward-looking and adaptable? What are the implications for the governance of the system and of its many institutions? Or is it wandering unchained in the global wilds? Universities praise themselves as being one of the world’s oldest and most enduring institution, but as Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Once, such questions may have been ludicrous to provoke at the outset of a Policy Reviews in Higher Education (PRIHE) editorial. Not anymore. Accordingly, in the balance of this editorial we sketch frontier topics which higher education can embrace to drive positive reform, then current journal contributions (Figure 1). We conclude with a call to engage and transform.
Figure 1: Current and frontier contributions
Any higher education policy zealot who has read Arnold Lobel’s brilliant treatise on Owl’s strange bumps in the bed (in which the Owl is afraid to go to sleep because of two strange bumps at the bottom of his bed, which are, in fact, his feet) (Lobel, 1982) understands that fear is created by running scared and can be tackled by uncovering and addressing matters in ways that unlock innovation and progress.
Policy Reviews in Higher Education plays this important role, though to date with fewer endearing drawings. Springing from inspiring intellectual dialogue with a member of the PRIHE Editorial Board and consequently guest author, Angel Calderon, we mark out a handful of narratives to carry forward policy research over the coming decades:
Moving beyond academic comfort communities
Handling looming demographic shifts and diversity
Addressing concerns about academic value
Creatively unpacking university clusterings and characteristics
Leaders who lead in smart ways.
Higher education researchers must explore how universities and the academics who comprise them can move beyond comfort communities. This means finding ways to move beyond conservative research literatures and straightjacketing bibliometrics, beyond discipline and collegial communities, beyond the academic treadmill, beyond the subsector itself, and beyond naval-gazing research. A doctorate followed by decades toiling in the same institution is no prudent recipe for forging broader cognitive or tangible engagement with enterprise and industry (public and private) and the broader world. How can career trajectories be redefined to evoke and even provoke experimentation, fertilisation, and broader contribution?
Policy researchers must find productive ways for helping universities handle looming demographic shifts. The Asian investment in higher education which has fuelled the last thirty years will plateau and in major instances decline. Smart countries and universities are already looking beyond increasingly risky ‘foreign and school-leaver markets’ at reconfigured alignments with career-inspiring work and adult life. As yet, however, few if any countries have policy and associated regulation or funding to spur new ventures and directions. Beyond the sensible need for regional or perhaps global ‘harmonisation’, what is the scope for more imaginative forward-thinking about the sort of institutional reconfigurations needed to deliver for societies in 2050? Also, universities continue to see international students as an alternative for demographic declines as well as for income generation, adopting imperialist approaches to new markets rather than anticipating global and local shifts. Internationalisation is still seen as an income source based on mobility flows, instead of as a possible change agent for innovation in education, research and service to society.
Genuine political concerns about academic quality and value are unlikely to be assuaged by fluffing up the fame of elite researchers who typically have little to do with students or voting communities. Graduate outcomes and relevance are some of the most pressing challenges for all governments pushing people to question the value of higher education and ensure it translates into good jobs. Broadening rankings to include topics like sustainability, while useful, misses the more substantial need to focus on local engagement rather than global striving. It is folly to think that all the ~88,000 higher education institutions (UNESCO, 2022: 12) should aspire to look the same. Pursuit of ‘world-class’ sameness is no substitute for critical research and delivery of more robust and compelling public information on value, quality of educational delivery and outcomes, and at the same time nuanced differentiation of the difference each and every institution can make. And arguably rankings bear increasing responsibility for distorting funding allocations and institutional/government priorities across many post-secondary systems.
Higher education sector growth in recent decades has spawned exciting, misunderstood and very important institutional and national configurations. There is an urgent need to creatively unpack university clusterings. Far too much time and money has been invested in studying groups characterised by bibliometric performance. More interestingly, there are university-defined groups, ranging from ‘presidents’ dinner clubs’ to disciplinary groups of nationally aligned associations. There are broader political, cultural and religious associations. There are groups connected through graduate or professional diasporas, or research connections. There is an emergent clustering of associations shaped by geopolitical/geoeconomic and national security imperatives. Ownership and tax-status has long been a means of shuffling universities into groups. What novel patterns and projections can be revealed?
With the intent of curating even more purposeful contributions, PRIHErecently launched a call for experts around the world to curate cognate collections on a high-impact policy contributions. These contributions which relate to hot topics in higher education policy seek to engage a group of scholars around important themes, and work with the journal and related networks to convene hybrid global seminars and deliver substantial insights on consequential frontier issues. PRIHE’s Editorial Board and Editors have spotlighted six shaping themes which raise questions, insights and issues to be addressed by policy, drawing on experiences from around the world. These include:
Proving contributions: Restoring public trust in higher education and universities
Emerging formations: Transnational, online and private higher education, regulation, ethics
Global challenges: Sustaining autonomy, academic freedom, purposeful research, independence
Lifelong learning: Valuing higher learning and skills across the lifespan, and
Valuing education: Raising the profile of large-scale teaching and learning.
Higher education in many if not most countries is confronting strong headwinds and needs strident thinking and reform rather than rent-seeking complacency. Carving out intellectual architectures to stimulate dialogue from disorder creates tailwinds for the tough work then required to create and promulgate the evidence which may sway policy and reform practice. In this editorial we have advanced a handful of non-ignorable developments as a guide for authorship, deliberation, and reforming practice.
Reference: Hazelkorn, E (2025) ‘Building a Unified Tertiary Education System. Trends and Propositions to Provoke Discussion, Trending Topics’ New Directions for Community Colleges Forthcoming.
Professor Ellen Hazelkorn is Joint Managing Partner, BH Associates. She is Professor Emeritus, Technological University Dublin.
Hamish Coates is professor of public policy, director of the Higher Education Futures Lab, and global tertiary education expert.
Hans de Wit is Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education, Senior Fellow of the international Association of Universities.
Tessa DeLaquil is postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Education at University College Dublin.
Angel Calderon is Director of Strategic Insights at RMIT University and expert on global tertiary education.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich might be famous for his public service, best-selling books, and viral social media posts, but he always considered teaching his true calling. The Last Class captures a master educator wrestling with the dual realities of his own aging and his students inheriting a world out of balance. Reich confronts the impending finality with unflinching candor, humor, introspection, and a rawness of emotion he has never shared publicly before.
One thousand students fill the biggest lecture hall on campus—the last class to receive Reich’s wisdom and exhortations not to accept that society has to stay the way it is. His final assignment: Who will be the teachers of tomorrow?
New Jersey’s legacy as a “slave state of the North” is often overlooked, especially in the sanitized histories of its most prestigious universities. Yet a closer examination reveals that the state’s institutions of higher education—particularly Princeton University and Rutgers University—were not only complicit in slavery, but were active beneficiaries of racial exploitation. Their histories are deeply intertwined with a system that built wealth and social power through the bondage of Black people.
This article is based on the findings of For Such a Time as This: The Nowness of Reparations for Black People in New Jersey, a landmark report from the New Jersey Reparations Council. The report is an urgent call for transformative change through reparative justice. It draws a direct throughline from New Jersey’s foundational embrace of slavery, through its Jim Crow era and more recent forms of structural racism, to today’s reality of “Two New Jerseys”—one Black, one white, separated by a staggering $643,000 racial wealth gap between median Black and white family wealth.
Princeton University: Built by the Enslaved, for the Elite
Founded in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, Princeton University’s early leadership reads like a roll call of slaveholders. Nine of its first presidents enslaved Black people. At least five brought enslaved individuals to live and labor on campus—including Aaron Burr Sr., who in 1756 purchased a man named Caesar to work in the newly built President’s House. Another, John Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration of Independence and president from 1768 to 1794, kept two people in bondage and spoke out against emancipation, claiming that freeing enslaved people would bring “ruin.”
Financially and culturally, Princeton thrived on slavery. Many of its trustees, donors, and faculty enriched themselves through plantation economies and the transatlantic slave trade. Historian Craig Steven Wilder has shown that the university’s enrollment strategy was deliberately skewed toward elite southern families who owned enslaved people. From 1768 to 1794, the proportion of southern students doubled, while the number of students from New Jersey declined. Princeton became a finishing school for the sons of America’s racial aristocracy.
Slavery was not just in the background—it was present in the daily life of the institution. Enslaved Black people worked in kitchens, cleaned dormitories, and served food at official university events. Human beings were bought and sold in full view of Nassau Hall. These men and women, their names often lost to history, were the invisible labor force that built the foundation for one of the wealthiest universities in the world.
The results of this complicity are measurable. Princeton graduates shaped the American Republic—including President James Madison, three U.S. Supreme Court justices, 13 governors, 20 senators, and 23 congressmen. Many of them carried forward the ideologies of white supremacy and anti-Black violence they absorbed in their youth.
Rutgers University: Queen’s College and the Profits of Enslavement
Rutgers University, originally established as Queen’s College in 1766, shares a similarly grim legacy. The college’s early survival depended on donations and labor directly tied to slavery. Prominent among its early trustees was Philip Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who made his fortune by trading enslaved people and operating Caribbean plantations.
Enslaved labor helped build Rutgers, too. A man named Will, enslaved by the family of a college trustee, is among the few individuals whose name has survived. His work helped construct the early physical campus, though his story, like so many others, is only briefly mentioned in account books and correspondence.
The intellectual environment of Queen’s College mirrored the dominant racial attitudes of the time. While some students and faculty opposed slavery, their voices were overwhelmed by an institution that upheld the social, political, and economic status quo. Rutgers, like Princeton, prepared white elites to rule a society built on racial exclusion.
Toward Reparative Justice
The For Such a Time as This report from the New Jersey Reparations Council underscores that the legacy of slavery is not a relic of the past—it is embedded in the material realities of today. New Jersey’s racial wealth gap—$643,000 between Black and white families—is not accidental. It is the result of centuries of dispossession, disinvestment, and discrimination.
The state’s leading universities played a formative role in that history. Acknowledgment of this fact is only a first step. True reckoning means meaningful reparative action. It means directing resources and power toward the communities that have been systematically denied them. It means funding education, housing, healthcare, and business development in Black communities, and making structural changes to how wealth and opportunity are distributed.
Princeton and Rutgers are not just relics of the past; they are major economic and political actors in the present. As institutions with billion-dollar endowments and vast influence, they have both the means and the moral obligation to contribute to a just future.
The question now is whether they will answer the call.
The shift to the political right in many countries in the world, including it appears the UK now, presents a new set of challenges for equitable access and success to higher education. Not that it needed any new ones. Inequalities in participation in higher education are pervasive, entrenched and low on the list of priorities of most governments. Since the early 2010s we have been working with other organisations across the world including the World Bank and UNESCO to understand the extent and nature of these inequalities but more importantly to initiate activities to address them. In 2016 working with colleagues including the late, great Geoff Whitty I undertook a project to bring together as much secondary data we could on who participates in higher education by social background across the world.
The Drawing the Global Access Map report found that in all the countries where we could find data (over 90%) higher education participation was unequal. The extent of this inequality differs but it binds together countries and higher education systems of all varieties. Following convening 2 global conferences on higher education access around the time of this report in an attempt to galvanise the global higher education community, we then launched World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED) in 2018. The aim of WAHED was to create a vehicle that would enable universities to launch activities to address inequalities in access and success on the day in their own place. As the pandemic hit we also started a global online conference and up to 2022 over 1000 organisations from over 100 countries engaged in WAHED. We also produced research to mark the day including the All Around the World – Equity Policies Across the Globe report in 2018 which looked at policies on higher education equity in over 70 countries. The report found that only 32% of the countries surveyed have defined specific participation targets for any equity group and only 11% have formulated a comprehensive equity strategy.
WAHED played an important role as a catalyst for activism, especially in contexts where individuals or departments felt that they were acting in isolation. However, progress will be limited if efforts are restricted just to an International Day of Action. Hence, in December 2024, working again with the World Bank, UNESCO as well as Equity Practitioners in Higher Education in Australasia (EPHEA), and a number of educational foundations, we launched the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). The aim of WAHEN is to construct an alliance for global, collective action on higher education equity and more information can be found here. It will focus on:
• Capacity Building via the sharing, professionalisation and enhancement of practice in learning, teaching and pre-HE outreach
• Collaboration – enabling organisations to formulate and deliver shared goals through a set of global communities of practice.
• Convening – bringing together those from across countries and sectors to affect change in higher education through World Access to Higher Education Day.
• Campaigning – advocating and working with policymakers and governments around the world producing research and evidence.
• Critical thinking – creating an online space where the knowledge based on ‘what works’ in equitable access and success can be developed & shared.
It was because there was a national organisation that works to tackle inequalities in higher education in the UK, the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), that I founded and led for 13 years, that WAHED and WAHEN happened. NEON led these efforts to build a global network. There remains a large way to go for WAHEN to be sustainable and impactful. We are working intently on how to position WAHEN and how it should focus its efforts. Inequalities in access and success are locally defined. They can’t be defined from a Euro-centric perspective, and they can also only be tackled through primarily work that is regional or national. The added value of international collaboration in this area needs to be articulated, it can’t be assumed. But at the same time, nor should the default assumption be that such a network or collaboration is less required where equitable access and success is concerned than in other parts of higher education. This assumption encapsulates the very problem at hand, ie the lack of willingness to recognise the extent of these inequalities and make the changes necessary to start to address them.
The present challenges to higher education presented by the global shift to the right brings into sharp focus the consequences of a failure to deal with these inequalities. Universities and left leaning governments are unable to frame higher education as open and available to all with the potential to enter. The accusations of elitism and the threats to academic freedom etc then become an easier sell to electorates for whom higher education has never mattered, or those in their family/community. It is more important than ever then that something like WAHEN exists. It is essential that we develop the tools that give higher education systems across the world to become more equitable and to resist populist narratives, and that we do this now.
Professor Graeme Atherton is Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford.
A hybrid conference Access and Geopolitics: Next Steps in Tackling the Equity Crisis in Global Higher Education, was held on 3 June 2025 at the Department of Education in Oxford, jointly organised by WAHEN, The Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). There were almost 40 presentations on: the politics – and geopolitics – of widening participation; the challenge of financing access; private provision and higher education as a public good; populism and the equity ‘backlash’; and, the challenge of generating meaningful participation data. Speakers included: John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, England; Dr Jamil Salmi, global tertiary education expert; Professor Shamit Saggar, Executive Director of Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success; Professor Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education, Oxford and President of the British Sociological Association; Professor Johanna Waters, Professor of Human Geography, UCL; Dr James Robson, Director of SKOPE and Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, Oxford; Graeme Atherton, Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford; and Danielle Watkis, DPhil student, Department of Education, Oxford. A full record of the event will soon be available on the CGHE website.
In his State of the Union message last night, President Trump reaffirmed his interest in encouraging rich people from around the world to become US citizens. The price of US Gold Cards, and a path to citizenship, will be $5M per person. Trump added that these Gold Card members would not have to pay taxes to their native countries.
Open universities have long symbolised a radical departure from the exclusivity of conventional universities. Conceived as institutions of access, intellectual emancipation, and social transformation, they promised to disrupt rigid academic hierarchies and democratise knowledge. Yet, as higher education is increasingly reshaped by market logics, can open universities still claim to be engines of social progress, or have they become institutions that now reproduce the very inequalities they sought to dismantle?
This question is not merely academic; it is profoundly political. Across the globe, democratic institutions are under siege, and the erosion of democracy is no longer an abstraction – it is unfolding in real time (cfEIU, 2024; Jones, 2025). The rise of far-right ideologies, resurgent racism, intensified attacks on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, and the erosion of protections for migrants and marginalised communities all point to a crisis of democracy that cannot be separated from the crisis of education (Giroux, 2025). As Giroux (1984) argues, education is never neutral; it can operate as both a potential site for fostering critical consciousness and resistance and a mechanism for reproducing systems of social control and domination. Similarly, Butler (2005) reminds us that the very categories of who counts as human, who is deemed grievable, and whose knowledge is legitimised are deeply political struggles.
Open universities, once heralded as radical interventions in knowledge production, now find themselves entangled in these struggles. Increasingly, they are forced to reconcile their egalitarian aspirations with the ruthless pressures of neoliberalism and market-driven reforms. The challenge they face is no less than existential: to what extent can they uphold their role as spaces of intellectual and social transformation, or will they become further absorbed into the logics of commodification and control?
My article (Filippakou, 2025) in Policy Reviews in Higher Education, ‘Two ideologies of openness: a comparative analysis of the Open Universities in the UK and Greece’,foregrounds a crucial but often overlooked dimension: the ideological battles that have shaped open universities over time. The UK Open University (OU) and the Hellenic Open University (HOU) exemplify two distinct yet converging trajectories. The UK OU, founded in the 1960s as part of a broader post-war commitment to social mobility, was a political project – an experiment in making university education available to those long excluded from elite institutions. The HOU, by contrast, emerged in the late 1990s within the European Union’s push for a knowledge economy, where lifelong learning was increasingly framed primarily in terms of workforce development. While both institutions embraced ‘openness’ as a defining principle, the meaning of that openness has shifted – from an egalitarian vision of education as a public good to a model struggling to reconcile social inclusion with neoliberal imperatives.
A key insight of this analysis is that open universities do not merely widen participation; they reflect deeper contestations over the purpose of higher education itself. The UK OU’s early success inspired similar models worldwide, but today, relentless marketisation – rising tuition fees, budget cuts, and the growing encroachment of corporate interests – threatens to erode its founding ethos.
Meanwhile, the HOU was shaped by a European policy landscape that framed openness not merely as intellectual emancipation but as economic necessity. Both cases illustrate the paradox of open universities: they continue to expand access, yet their structural constraints increasingly align them with the logic of precarity, credentialism, and market-driven efficiency.
This struggle over education is central to the survival of democracy. Arendt (1961, 2005) warned that democracy is not self-sustaining; it depends on an informed citizenry capable of judgment, debate, and resistance. Higher education, in this sense, is not simply about skills or employability – it is about cultivating the capacity to think critically, to challenge authority, and to hold power to account (Giroux, 2019). Open universities were once at the forefront of this democratic mission. But as universities in general, and open universities in particular, become increasingly instrumentalised – shaped by political forces intent on suppressing dissent, commodifying learning, and hollowing out universities’ transformative potential – their role in sustaining democratic publics is under threat.
The real question, then, is not simply whether open universities remain ‘open’ but how they define and enact this openness. To what extent do they serve as institutions of intellectual and civic transformation, or have they primarily been reduced to flexible degree factories, catering to market demands under the guise of accessibility? By comparing the UK and Greek experiences, this article aims to challenge readers to rethink the ideological stakes of openness in higher education today. The implications extend far beyond open universities themselves. The broader appeal of this analysis lies in its relevance to anyone interested in universities as sites of social change. Open universities are not just alternatives to conventional universities – they represent larger struggles over knowledge, democracy, and economic power. The creeping normalisation of authoritarian politics, the suppression of academic freedom, and the assault on marginalised voices in public discourse demand that we reclaim higher education as a site of resistance.
Can open universities reclaim their radical promise? If higher education is to resist the encroachment of neoliberalism and reactionary politics, we must actively defend institutions that prioritise intellectual freedom, civic literacy, and higher education for the public good. The future of open universities – and higher education itself – depends not only on institutional policies but on whether scholars, educators, and students collectively resist these forces. The battle for openness is not just about access; it is about the kind of society we choose to build – for ourselves and the generations to come.
Ourania Filippakou is a Professor of Education at Brunel University of London. Her research interrogates the politics of higher education, examining universities as contested spaces where power, inequality, and resistance intersect. Rooted in critical traditions, she explores how higher education can foster social justice, equity, and transformative change.
The debate over whether higher education (HE) serves as a vehicle for social mobility that nurtures meritocracy or as a mechanism for social reproduction that reinforces and exacerbates inequalities in society has persisted for some time. The first perspective regards HE as a meritocratic, achievement-based system of stratification that selects and allocates individuals to societal roles based solely on their merit (in line with Émile Durkheim’s theories). Conversely, the second viewpoint sees education as a means that perpetuates social stratification and the cultural hegemony of the elite (reflecting Bourdieu’s perspective). This phenomenon occurs because students’ socio-economic backgrounds significantly influence their access to, decisions regarding, and success within HE.
To mitigate the impact of socioeconomic background on individuals’ educational opportunities, a movement of research and activism spans from South America to Africa and the Far East, advocating for free HE. To investigate this claim, I examined the situation in Syria, which has consistently asserted that it possesses a meritocratic HE system aimed at fostering societal equality through the provision of free public HE for all since the 1970s. I analysed the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) database for 15 academic years, from 2001 to 2015. This dataset encompassed information on student access and graduation rates, categorised by type of education (public, private, higher institutes, and technical institutes), education level (undergraduate and postgraduate), gender (male and female), city, faculty, and specialisations. This analysis revealed various forms of inequality, specifically class-based inequalities, city-based inequalities, and gender-based inequalities.
Class-based inequalities
Although every citizen in Syria who finishes school can access free public HE, many students from high socio-economic backgrounds choose private HE to obtain better education or to pursue specific courses unavailable in the free public tracks. An analysis of the data reveals that the graduation rate in private institutions is almost double that of public institutions. One of the reasons behind this discrepancy in graduation rates between free public HE and private HE is the lack of funding for free public HE. Public university students suffer from a high student-teacher ratio (in some cases, 140 students per teacher) and poor infrastructure compared to the low student-teacher ratio (around 20 students per teacher) and better infrastructure in private universities. Furthermore, inadequate funding for free public universities has led qualified lecturers to prefer teaching at private institutions. This has widened the inequality between public and private HE institutions, as students with the financial capacity to access private HE learn from the most qualified teachers in Syria and receive the best knowledge available.
City-based inequalities
Although Syria has 14 cities, during the analysis period (2008–2013), it had only 5 free public universities located in 5 different cities. These universities have small branches or centres in all Syrian cities, offering limited course options. This design of the HE system has neglected some cities in Syria, leaving them without a proper educational framework. Having only one large university in select cities advantages students who reside in those areas, as they do not endure the added financial and mental pressures that students from other cities face to access education, such as paying for accommodation, living away from home, and travelling to see their families. Consequently, many students from cities without a university may encounter additional barriers to accessing HE, negatively affecting their academic, professional, and personal opportunities and choices. This could explain why cities like Damascus, Homs, and Latakia (where universities are located) are consistently overrepresented in HE, while students from Hama, al-Hasakeh, and al-Rakka (which lack universities) are consistently underrepresented.
In addition to the inequality of access to HE, city-based inequalities also encompass disparities in accessing the various specialisations and faculties offered by HE. This is further exacerbated by the sector’s design as not all faculties or specialisations are available at every university or branch. For instance, undergraduate media studies are solely taught in Damascus. Although Damascus constitutes only 8.75% of the Syrian population, students from Damascus account for 23.9% of the total number of media students. This representation is nearly three times their percentage of the overall population. This significant overrepresentation of students in certain courses occurs at the expense of those from other cities who are unable to access these courses and faculties because they are not available in their localities. This trend of unequal access to specialisations applies to numerous disciplines (eg Pharmacy, Dentistry, Medicine, Arts, IT, Mechanical Engineering, and Architecture). In each of these specialisations, students in the cities where the courses are taught have a distinct advantage over students from other cities in terms of access.
Gender-based inequalities
Officials in the Syrian HE sector have consistently celebrated the progress they have made, asserting that free HE has eliminated gender-based inequality by achieving near parity in enrolment rates. Although noticeable progress has indeed occurred, this claim does not hold up under scrutiny as it obscures other gender inequalities affecting certain groups within the population.
An analysis of the database reveals that, while there is no overarching gender gap in the sector, apart from in undergraduate public universities, disparities exist across all other educational tracks. Moreover, the higher the level of education (Master’s, PhD, etc), the more pronounced the gap becomes. The analysis further indicates that gender-based inequalities extend beyond females’ access to specific tracks and impact female academic representation within the sector. A 14-year average shows that female teachers constitute less than 25% of the total teaching staff in the sector. However, in lower-paid and less prestigious roles, such as technical and administrative positions, females occupy more jobs than their male counterparts (57%).
Conclusion
Simply offering free HE does not address the broader socio-economic inequalities that limit people’s opportunities in HE. Assuming that free HE will foster equality in society presumes that everyone has an equal capacity to access education. This paper demonstrates that HE, if not paired with an inclusive sectoral design, increased funding, and a comprehensive strategy to alleviate socioeconomic inequalities, will persist as a site of social reproduction that creates and exacerbates disparities within societies, even if provided at no cost.
Dr Oudai Tozan recently finished his PhD at the University of Cambridge, researching the potential role of exiled Syrian academics and researchers in rebuilding the higher education sector of Syria. This blog is based on an article published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education: Tozan, O. (2024) ‘Peeling the multiple layers of inequalities in free higher education policies’ (online 12 July 2024).
