Further, higher, better?

Post-secondary education is on the move. Statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) indicate the global expansion in student numbers and achievement at the tertiary level (OECD 2006). This expansion reflects a widening of access to new groups of students that have historically been excluded from post-secondary education and the changing needs of a global, knowledge-based economy. Both are reflected in the diversity of institutional form adopted to meet this growing demand. Universities are typically distinguished from other institutions that exclusively or mainly provide "further," "technical," "vocational," or "trades" education. Nomenclature varies, as the authors contributing to this book from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, and England help to illustrate. In this chapter we use the term "post-secondary" while authors of other chapters use, variously, "post-school," "post-compulsory," "comprehensive," "transbinary," and "tertiary". These differences of language aside, the further-higher distinction, in most educational systems across the world, is reflected in a pyramid of institutional forms with universities sitting at its apex. This book sets out to explore the validity of this fundamental divide on the basis of its rationality and its implications for economic and social progress in the twenty-first century. It aims to challenge this conventional boundary.