HIGHER EDUCATION: CHANGING TASKS AND DEFINITIONS

Given the unprecedented expansion of European higher education systems over the last twenty‐five years, it has become increasingly difficult to analyse and to classify the different types of systems and institutions. At the same time, however, it has become all the more important to be able to do so in ways which give accurate and usable results. While commenting on the ambiguities and inaccuracies of the various approaches to classification which certain specialists have proposed, the author argues in favour of his own functional approach to the classification of universities by ideal type as based on extrapolations from heuristic definitions which he formulates of four national models of higher education institution: the research model of Germany, the personality development model of England, the training model of France, and the diversified model of the United States, the lattter combining elements of the first three. Individual institutions and systems in Europe and in North America reflect the typologies of these models in infinitely varying proportions. Armed with the ability and the willingness to analyse according to these models, future students of higher education should place less emphasis on analysing the formal aspects of structural differentiation and more on the functional features of tertiary education and research institutions so as to produce more accurate and usable analyses, definitions, and classifications.

* This article is the outcome of a project, “The Changing Functions of the European Universities”, which the author is directing at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy), under the sponsorship of the Commission of the European Communities.

Notes

* This article is the outcome of a project, “The Changing Functions of the European Universities”, which the author is directing at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy), under the sponsorship of the Commission of the European Communities.