The dualism between elite and mass higher education, which characterized and is still characterizing higher education systems, has produced in the last 50 years different organizational and institutional arrangements. The article expounds how the transition from elite to mass higher education in Europe along the 60’s and the 80’s of the last century gave rise to binary systems based on the distinction between university and non-university sectors. Nowadays this kind of arrangement dominates the European scene, but several signs lead to hold that a further process of change is at work bringing to the overcoming of this kind of system and toward the structuration of unified and stratified systems of higher education. The dualism between elite and mass higher education will no longer concern the sharp distinction between university and non-university sectors. Instead, it will be a matter of institutional and organizational differentiation within unified systems and single higher education institutions. Thus the tension between elite and mass higher education could be redefined both in the organisational forms that structure it and in its contents.

Michele Rostan, Massimiliano Vaira, in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL LAVORO " 105/2007, pp. 218-228, DOI: