Realising the Educational Potential of Mass Higher Education

This open access book addresses the current disillusionment with mass higher education and argues that it is based on a profound misunderstanding of its educational potential.The authors analyse a seven-year longitudinal research project that tracked participants who studied chemistry or chemical engineering from their first year of university until up to three years after they graduated.Drawing on over 700 interviews with students/graduates from two English, two South African and two American universities, the book explores the educational intentions of their degree programmes, what participants wanted to get out of going to university and studying for a degree, how their views of knowledge and the world changed, and what they felt they had gained from going to university.The book argues that the educational potential of higher education lies, not in graduate salaries or employability, but in the ways in which engaging with structured bodies of knowledge changes students’ understandin