Expansion and Diversification in Higher Education

Given the growth of national higher education systems, questions of access, expansion and diversification have regularly been addressed by higher education policy-makers and researchers. Often a straightforward relationship is presumed between the growth of the student body and the expansion of higher education systems and between the growth of the student numbers and diversification of such systems. This chapter presents an alternative approach to these phenomena. A theoretical model is built around the concept of ‘carrying capacity’. The preliminary empirical findings — using data from the Netherlands and Australia — support the assumed role of, for example, national GDP, labour force productivity and the number of higher education graduates in explaining total enrolments in higher education. The findings regarding the relationship between enrolments and diversity were not in line with the expectations. The alternative approach, nevertheless, seems worth pursuing.