Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate effects of the market mechanism on the structural changes in the British higher education system, focusing on the differentiation of positions and functions between Pre-1992Universities and Former Polytechnic Universities.
From the late 1980s there was a rapid expansion of higher education in Britain.Age participation rates in higher education approximately doubled during a period of less than ten years.This expansion meant a structural change from an elite into a mass system.In this “massification” process, the British government transformed its higher education system into a unitary system from a binary one under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. In this Act, many of the public sector higher education institutions (mainly Polytechnics) were given university status. As a result of these reforms, about half of the universities we see today were upgraded from Polytechnics after 1992. Today, the unified university sector is comprised of institutions that originally had different histories and missions.
