Adaptation and Survival in Changing Conditions: The International Context

Abstract

Governments are now addressing the issues of the contribution, efficiency and value for money of higher education in the face of its increasing demands on national resources. The structures in which higher education has now to operate are subject to radical change and the financial pressures will continue to increase. The following factors pose increasingly insistent challenges for universities and other institutions of higher education: the conflicts arising from the revision of the school curriculum particularly in the United Kingdom and its impact on the nature of pre‐1991 White Paper University education, especially; the pressure to offer greater opportunities for access at different points in an individual's life; increases in sophistication and hence cost in the infrastructure needed for leading‐edge research leading to demands for greater selectivity and concentration of support for curiosity driven research and the simultaneous pressure for clearer directions for research in supporting increasingly technology‐driven economies; governmental pressure for accountability and public assurance by universities of their effective management of public funds through appropriate and independent mechanisms for quality control and assessment; and continued and continuous insistence on expansion at marginal cost to the taxpayer. The pressures generated by these factors, singly and in combination, require new approaches by higher education administrations to ensuring the continued stability and quality of their institutions. Administrators ‐‐ in the sense of professional members of an internal civil service ‐‐ will need to be seen and to see themselves and to be trained as equal partners in the management of their institutions. Clear management responsibility and authority, sensitively and imaginatively exercised and accompanied by appropriate effective control and monitoring mechanisms will be part of the institutions's survival kit.

Notes

∗ Stuart Bosworth is Registrar at the University of Salford, UK. This paper was presented at the AITEA National Conference held in Darwin in August 1991.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stuart R. Bosworth∗

∗ Stuart Bosworth is Registrar at the University of Salford, UK. This paper was presented at the AITEA National Conference held in Darwin in August 1991.