ACCESS

Abstract

Higher education (HE), as a whole throughout Asia-Pacific, has grown rapidly, resulting in greater opportunities for access to higher education. The rapid increase in access to HE over the past two decades has come at a tremendous cost of a severe and pervasive decline in academic quality. It is unclear whether all qualified students have access to quality higher education. HE in Asia-Pacific has had much success in terms of availability and to some extent, accessibility, but not horizontally, in that universities are mostly stratified and not every individual has equal access to quality HE. More attention, therefore, should be given to the qualitative factors that affect the equity of access to HE, such as values and attitudes toward education and job opportunity, learning performance, parental education, test and admission systems, and the cumulative effects from achievement gaps created from early childhood education through to high school sectors.