Startpage for Swedish National Agency for Higher Education

 
 
Please note! The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education was closed down on 31 December 2012. Instead two new agencies have been established: the Swedish Council for Higher Education and the Swedish Higher Education Authority. This website will continue to operate as the new agencies will have links to information it contains.  

2003:22 R

Equal opportunities in higher education - a bibliography with a commentary

At the behest of the National Agency´s Council for Gender Equality, we have compiled a bibliography of studies of issues related to equal opportunities in connection with recruitment to higher education institutions between 1995 and 2002. We were subsequently commissioned to supplement this bibliography to include works dealing with equality of opportunity in higher education in general and not only in connection with recruitment. This work took place between November 2001 and January 2003.

Dag Kyndel has been responsible for the literature searches and the preliminary appraisals. Leif Lindberg and Ulla Riis have produced the commentary. We share responsibility for the analyses we present in this report and for the categorisation of the literature listed.

The bibliography is divided into two sections. The first lists the titles of works dealing with the recruitment of students and academic staff. We have read these works and written comments on them. A bibliography with a commentary is not the same thing as a review of research or a survey of the literature. In studies of this kind different findings are contrasted with each other and the conclusions drawn are compared and evaluated. The commentary to this bibliography only accounts for the works located and their principal contents. The first section of the bibliography is what we originally envisaged.

The second section of the bibliography lists - without comments - works dealing with equality of opportunity in higher education in the Nordic countries. In terms of volume, this section of the bibliography is considerably more far-reaching. After we had spent some time working on the texts relating to recruitment we discovered that considerably more had been written about equality of opportunity in higher education than we had first thought. We therefore decided, in consultation with the Council, to catalogue literature that was not restricted to recruitment and to extend our searches to all the Nordic countries.