XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

84

Inequalities in Higher Education: The Global Struggle for Access, Sustainability, and Success

RC04 Sociology of Education (host committee)

Language: English

Mass participation in higher education and the appalling attrition and failure rate, globally, must force a critical interrogation of policy and practice with respect to the politically and socially correct policies on widening access to higher education and its uneasy relationship with ensuring sustainability and ensuring success. Ian Scott (2014) argues that the ‘predictors’ are dismally consistent across many contexts. Student’s socio-economic background is directly linked to their chances of success (Bourdieu and Passerson, 1971 and Walpole, 2003), as cited by Scott (2014). Therefore, the key area of contestation would remain a system of higher education made up of organisations that perpetuate class inequality with a dubious understanding of the diversity of its student population and the pre-conceived notions of their ability to compete equally and successfully with their counterparts from other racial and socio-economic groups, that such notions deliberately sustain the status quo with little effort at reforming embedded and intransigent traditions that have come to characterise institutions of higher learning. This session therefore intends to focus on the following:
a. Is mass participation in higher education sustainable?
b. Can institutions of higher learning attribute level of success to social class and          absolve themselves from responding to the needs of such students in terms of how they teach, what they teach and why they teach what they teach?
c. Do institutions of higher learning link their vision and missions to the broader societal imperatives of development?