Simon Marginson

Professor of Higher Education | Linacre College

About me

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. He retired from full-time work in the Department in May 2024 but remains active in research and doctoral education.

Simon led the ESRC Centre for Global Higher Education between November 2015 and May 2024. His research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, higher education in East Asia, the public and social contributions of higher education, and higher education and social equality. He is currently preparing an integrated theorisation of higher education. His scholarship is widely published and cited (Google h-index 86 in September 2024). Books include Changing Higher Educaiton in India, edited with Saumen Chattopadhyay and NV Varghese (Bloomsbury, 2021); Changing Higher Education in East Asia, edited with Xin Xu (Bloomsbury, 2022); and Assessing the Contributions of Higher Education, edited with Brendan Cantwell, Daria Platonova and Anna Smolentseva (Edward Elgar, 2023).

Selected Publications
Books
  • Marginson, S. (2016).The Dream is Over: The crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of higher education. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Marginson, S. (2016).Higher Education and the Common Good. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing.
  • Tran, L. & Marginson, S. (eds.). (2018).Internationalisation of Vietnamese Higher Education. Dordrecht: Springer Nature.
  • Carnoy, M., Froumin, I., Leshukov, O. & Marginson, S. (eds.). (2018) Higher Education in Federal Countries. New Delhi: Sage.
  • Cantwell, B., Marginson, S. & Smolentseva, A. (eds.). (2018) High Participation Systems of Higher Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Callender, C., Locke, W. & Marginson, S. (eds.) (2020). Changing Higher Education for a Changing World. London: Bloomsbury.
  • Chattopadhyay, S., Marginson, S. & Varghese, N.V. (eds.) (2021). Changing Higher Education in India. London: Bloomsbury.
  • Marginson, S. & Xu, X. (eds.) (2022). Changing Higher Education in East Asia. (2022). London: Bloomsbury.
  • Marginson, S., Cantwell, B., Platonova, D. & Smolentseva, A. (eds.) (2023). Assessing the contributions of higher education. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Recent Journal Papers
  • Marginson, S. (2016). The worldwide trend to high participation higher education: Dynamics of social stratification in inclusive systems. Higher Education, 72 (4), 413-435.
  • Marginson, S. (2018). Private/public in higher education: A synthesis of economic and political approaches. Studies in Higher Education, 43 (2), 322-337
  • Marginson, S. (2018) Global trends in higher education financing: The United Kingdom. International J. Educational Development, 58, 26-36
  • Marginson, S. (2018) National/global synergy in the development of higher education and science in China since 1978. Frontiers of Education in China, 13 (4), 486–512
  • Marginson, S. (2019) Limitations of human capital theory. Studies in Higher Education, 44 (2), 287-301
  • Marginson, S. and Yang, L. (2022). Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: A comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 20 (1), 1-32.
  • Marginson, S. (2022). ‘All things are in flux’: China in global science. Higher Education, 83 (4), 881-910.
  • Marginson, S. (2022). What drives global science? The four competing narratives. Studies in Higher Education, 47 (8), 1566-1584.
  • Marginson, S. (2022). Global science and national comparisons: Beyond bibliometrics and scientometrics. Comparative Education, 58 (2), 125-146.
  • Marginson, S. (2022). What is global higher education? Oxford Review of Education, 48 (4), 492-517.
  • Marginson S. (2022). Space and scale in higher education: The glonacal heuristic revisited. Higher Education, 84 (6),1365-1395.
  • Marginson, S. & Xu, X. (2023). Hegemony and inequality in global science: Problems of the center-periphery model. Comparative Education Review, 67 (1). https://doi.org/10.1086/722760
  • Zhan, T. and Marginson, S. (2023). Institutional dual identity in research capacity building in IBCs: the case of NYU Shanghai. Higher Education, 87 (2), 471-490. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01017-9
  • Highman, L., Marginson, S. and Papatsiba, V. (2023). Higher education and research: Multiple negative effects and no new opportunities after Brexit. Contemporary Social Science. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2023.2192044
  • Marginson, S. and Yang, L. (2024) Has the public good of higher education been emptied out? The case of England. Higher Education, 88, 217-319. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01
  • Yang, L., Marginson, S. and Xu, X. (2024). Thinking through the world: A tianxia heuristic for higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 22 (2), 139-155. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2022.2098696
  • Marginson, S. (2024). Student self-formation: An emerging paradigm in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 49 (4), 748-762. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2023.2252826
  • Marginson, S. (2024). The climate-nature emergency and higher education. International Journal of Chinese Education, 13 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2212585X241233010

Research

Books

Book chapters

Conference papers

Journal articles