Description
Book SynopsisThe university system is no longer fit for purpose. UK higher education was designed for much smaller numbers of students and a very different labour market. Students display worrying levels of mental health issues, exacerbated by unprecedented levels of debt, and the dubious privilege of competing for poorly-paid graduate internships. Meanwhile who goes to university is still too often determined by place of birth, gender, class or ethnicity. Who are universities for? argues for a large-scale shake up of how we organise higher education, how we combine it with work, and how it fits into our lives. It includes radical proposals for reform of the curriculum and how we admit students to higher education, with part-time study (currently in crisis in England) becoming the norm. A short, polemical but also deeply practical book, Who are universities for? offers concrete solutions to the problems facing UK higher education and a way forward for universities to become more inclusive and more responsive to local and global challenges.
Trade Review"A groundbreaking plan for overhauling the universities system... [a] radical blueprint—making even the dreaming spires of Oxbridge [into] Open Universities", The Social Review
"An important book that brims with ideas for transforming HE for a diverse, inclusive, post-disciplinary world. Refreshingly radical." Tim Blackman, VC, Middlesex University
"A groundbreaking plan for overhauling the universities system… [a] radical blueprint—making even the dreaming spires of Oxbridge [into] Open Universities." Social Review
"Urgent, radical and prescriptive, this polemic provides a radical manifesto for Higher Education in the era of the millennials. In the wake of student debt, a lack of social mobility and excess at the top, it breaks open the sterile complacency that has for too long gone unchallenged." David Lammy, MP
"This powerful, accessible and passionate book highlights the way current HE excludes and disadvantages, and proposes an inclusive system design fit for part-time as well as full-time study. Fascinating and persuasive." Professor Sir Alan Tuckett, University of Wolverhampton
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Who are universities for? Towards a university for everyone: some proposals Invisible crises: the state of universities in the UK ‘It’s not for me’: outsiders in the system Education and the shape of a life False negatives: on admissions The women in Plato’s Academy Where do the questions come from? Conclusion: The university-without-walls
