Realising the Educational Potential of Mass Higher Education

This open access book addresses the current disillusionment with mass higher education and argues that it is based on a profound misunderstanding of its educational potential.

The authors analyse a seven-year longitudinal research project that tracked participants who studied chemistry or chemical engineering from their first year of university until up to three years after they graduated. Drawing on over 700 interviews with students/graduates from two English, two South African and two American universities, the book explores the educational intentions of their degree programmes, what participants wanted to get out of going to university and studying for a degree, how their views of knowledge and the world changed, and what they felt they had gained from going to university. The book argues that the educational potential of higher education lies, not in graduate salaries or employability, but in the ways in which engaging with structured bodies of knowledge changes students’ understanding of the world and what they can do in it. The authors consider the implications of this argument for how the educational role of higher education is understood by students, graduates, universities, and policymakers and how this understanding might be drawn upon to counter the damaging disillusionment with mass higher education that appears to be growing in many countries.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

• Publication date: 19 February 2026
• Page count: 224
• Dimensions: Height 238 mm; Width 156 mm; Thickness 18 mm
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781350511576