Higher Education Reform. (a) Establishment and strengthening the institutional capacity of the Coordinating Board for Higher Education to promote strategic planning and develop a standard and accreditation mechanism for higher education.
(b) Establishment and operation of a Higher Education Fund for the financing, through the provision of Higher Education Fund Grants to Beneficiaries, of Sub-projects.
Higher Education Reform. The Higher Education sector also experienced its own set of reforms focused on expanding the sector to ensure fair access to individuals from all backgrounds. An analysis by Xxxxxx and Xxxxxxxx (2006) investigated whether this HE expansion actually worsened the existing inequalities between students from high socio-economic backgrounds and those from poorer backgrounds, because if the subsequent marketisation of the education sector meant that students with richer parents who had more resources in terms of information and finances, they would have had an advantage over students from lower-SES backgrounds. The UK Higher Education sector grew significantly in the 1960s with the creation of seven new universities and the transformation of ten colleges of advanced technology into university colleges following the Xxxxxxx Committee Report of 1963 (Xxxxxxx, 1963), which argued that every qualified young person should be given the opportunity to participate in HE. Prior to the expansion, students were able to access HE for free in the UK. However, in order to fund the growth in the HE sector, it became necessary to introduce fees in order to accommodate the growing number of students going to university. In 1998, means-tested upfront fees of roughly £1,000 had to be paid by most students, excluding those experiencing financial hardship. Additionally, the grants that poorer students were able to access were reduced and eventually scrapped in 1999. By 2003, other reforms were introduced which allowed individual universities to charge different tuition fees of up to £3,000 payable by students in loan-style instalments upon graduation, based on their earnings (Machin and Vignoles, 2006). The 2010 reform by the Coalition government which came into effect in 2012/13 was the most extreme reform faced by the HE sector. The main change was that universities were allowed to significantly increase tuition fees because the bulk of university funding for teaching at the undergraduate level would now come from tuition fees paid by students. The reform would also allow the provision of Higher Education by private universities and Further Education Colleges (FECs) who could provide education services at cheaper costs. (Xxxxx and Carasso, 2013). There were concerns that such changes to student finance and funding would be harmful to social mobility. For Xxxxxx et al. (2017), this is not necessarily true since up-front tuition fees could be circumvented through government loans ...
