Educational expansion or credential inflation? The evolution of part‐time study by adults at McGill University, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Part‐time students have accounted for a significant proportion of rising participation in higher education in many countries. The objectives of this paper are to enrich the empirical literature concerning the inclusion of part‐time adult learners in higher education, and to assess the two competing theoretical frameworks that have emerged to explain the international expansion of higher education in recent decades: human capital theory and social exclusion theory. Human capital theorists argue that increasingly complex demands of economies and workplaces have caused the expansion of educational provision. Theorists of social exclusion argue that increasingly intense competition among labour market participants has caused the inflation of educational credentials. This paper uses original, archival research to narrate the history of part‐time, degree‐credit study at McGill University in Canada. It finds that McGill provided a wide range of part‐time study opportunities in the 1920s and early 1930s, resisted the provision of such opportunities from the 1940s through the 1960s, and reinstated extensive part‐time study opportunities for adults in the 1970s. While both educational expansion and credential inflation took place at McGill neither human capital theory nor social exclusion theory can fully account for the rise, fall, and re‐birth of part‐time study for adults. To understand this evolution, more proximate causes, such as institutional politics and government funding models, must be explored. This paper raises important questions for future research, including those relating to gender and equity in the participation of part‐time students in higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".