Abstract
Widening participation in creative arts higher education has international, national, and localised manifestations. This chapter explores the global context of widening participation by considering the policy model of neoliberalism. From a global perspective, widening participation in higher education generally has been linked to economic prosperity by supplying a workforce with high-level skills and knowledge. The neoliberal paradigm conceptualises higher education as benefitting the individual and contributing to their personal prosperity while simultaneously benefitting the national economy. Therefore, global policies are directed towards widening participation in particular ways.
Measures to widen participation have increasingly focused on individuals, responsible for funding their education as customers and positioned as having choice and opportunity. As customers need to make informed choices, world rankings of universities have become a significant driver in higher education and also a mechanism of elitism, with implications for students who do not attend leading universities or who study subjects not perceived as contributing to economic growth, such as the creative arts. Students’ global mobility has strengthened the case for harmonisation of higher education systems yet priorities and policies regarding widening participation largely remain tied to national and localised considerations, with slowly growing efforts towards international analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Some former socialist nations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia do not use non-monetary interventions, assuming that a ‘meritocratic’ entrance examination for university represents a guarantor of equality (Salmi, 2018).
- 2.
Possible selves are “individuals’ ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming … [and] function as incentives for future behavior and to provide an evaluative and interpretive context for the current view of self” (Markus & Nurius, 1986, p. 954).
- 3.
Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.
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da Costa, L. (2022). The Global Context for Widening Participation in Creative Arts Higher Education. In: Broadhead, S. (eds) Access and Widening Participation in Arts Higher Education. The Arts in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97450-3_2
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