This chapter and the next offer a survey of the historical development of mass higher education in the UK since 1960, chronologically in this chapter and thematically in Chapter 4. They offer a sketch of the broader development of the system rather than a detailed account of policy making based on archives, such as Michael Shattock provided (Shattock, 2012a). The chronology sketched in this chapter is divided into five periods – higher education around 1960; reform and growth headlined by the Robbins Report and modified by the binary policy during the 1960s; advances but also setbacks between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s; the emergence of an unambiguously mass system in the 1990s and 2000s, accompanied by a contested process of ‘modernisation’; and the period since 2010, with an attempted shift towards a higher education ‘market’ (at any rate in England). A final section in this chronology briefly sketches developments outside the UK. In the next chapter, four themes are explored in conclusion: (i) ‘steering’ and regulation at national and system levels; (ii) the political economy of higher education, in particular the reshaping of the system from binary to unified (and back again?), but also the fragmentation of the UK system into two, possibly three, national sub-systems; (iii) the transformation of institutional governance and management – from collegiality to managerialism; and (iv) new intellectual agendas, subjects, curricula and learning economies.

Higher education in 1960

In the early 1960s there were fewer than 200,000 students – studying at universities offering first and postgraduate degrees, at technical and art colleges offering advanced certificates and diplomas, and at colleges of education training mainly primary school teachers, the three sectors which, at the time, constituted ‘higher education’. But it is an anachronism to talk about a ‘system’ of higher education before the Robbins Report (Robbins Report, 1963). Despite receiving an increasing proportion of their funding from the University Grants Committee (UGC), established in 1919, universities remained a collection of autonomous institutions. The Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP), the ancestor of Universities UK, had yet to develop much beyond being a club that enabled vice-chancellors informally to exchange information and share views, and occasionally indulge in discreet lobbying. It is even an anachronism to talk about ‘sectors’.