Problematising higher education enrolment policy: A comparative case study of Australia and Taiwan

Abstract

Over the last four decades, higher education enrolment has been perceived as various types of ‘problems’. Some government, for example, have widened university access to respond to the problem of growing student demand, while other sought to resolve the problem of an insufficiently skilled workforce. A robust body of literature has analysed the effectiveness of policies; scant studies have delved deeper to explore the conceptualisations of the problems themselves. This thesis examined higher education enrolment policies to better understand how different ideas, beliefs, and norms could lead to diverse policies. This study used Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be’, and Bartlett and Vavrus’s Comparative Case Study to explore the historicalpolitical discourses that underpinned the representations of enrolment problems in Australia and Taiwan. The study involved 40 interviews with high-profile policy actors in Australia (n=21) and Taiwan (n=19). It secondarily collected a considerable corpus of archival sources from the two countries (n=66). The interview transcripts and policy documents were transcribed and analysed using an inductive approach to generate its themes. The findings reveal three theoretical and applied implications. First, higher education expansions in Australia and Taiwan represented a specific domain where individuals and the population, universities, and the state were intimately intertwined, offering a unique ‘truth’ pronounced by governments related to their perceived obligations to both widen university provision to respond to growing student demand and to enhance national competitiveness. Yet, this ‘truth’ was produced differently according to local contexts. Second, this thesis argues that policies were produced in tension with extant power/knowledge relations and various historical-political entanglements. Last, both cases manifested complex governing apparatuses that shaped the rules of how university enrolments could function.