Book Release | The Challenge of Change: Access and Opportunity in Mass Higher Education

Given recent public commentary, you might be forgiven for thinking the Australian Universities Accord is all about international students?  It isn’t.  It is about ACCESS.  Access once referred to special courses for adults designed to secure access to universities for people who had been denied chances to study earlier in life. Its ethos was egalitarian and offered routes to learning and opportunities often denied. The 1970s saw the growth of mass higher education and Access across many parts of the world was part of that upsurge of opportunity. This new groundbreaking book on ACCESS brought to you by Engagement Australia pivots between this foundation period and urgent contemporary issues facing higher education in the 2020s and a connection is made through the idea of ‘threads through time’ between then and now and between Great Britain and Australia which had both similar and shared yet different concerns as democratic societies facing challenges.

Key themes include the problematical nature of human capital theory in explaining HE growth and change, the changing character of the public sphere, persisting inequality, meritocracy and elite formation and the public good. The book deals with how knowledge is both a catalyst for change and is deeply problematical for marginal groups in society and forces us to engage with issues, including race, racism and ethnicity alongside the impact of climate change. Access exists both within and beyond formal sites of learning and still gives us possibilities.  Join us for the launch of this major publication at the EA Excellence Engagement Awards in November 2024.