301have a massified system of higher education. In fact, the developed countries have
universalized higher education, middle income countries are in a stage of massifica-
tion of the system and it is a fast-growing segment in the less-developed countries.
In other words, over a period of time, higher education sector has become a massive
enterprise consisting of thousands of institutions, enrolling millions of students,
employing millions of people and investing billions of dollars.
The higher education sector has become complex organizations engaged in pro-
ducing knowledge, training minds and remaining relevant as public good institu-
tions (Altbach 2014 ). The massification of higher education and heavy public
investment in the sector necessitated more evidence-based decision-making in
higher education. In the context of massification, higher education systems have
become more complex and higher education policy more difficult. This necessitated
the study of higher education as a separate field or domain of specialization. Higher
education emerged as a field of study even in those countries where the size of the
sector was relatively small.
What are the distinguishing features of any area to claim as a separate field of
study? Any field of study should have the capacity to produce knowledge in the area
and develop academic programmes leading to award of degrees. It is expected that
the research studies produce new knowledge to justify the domain to remain as a
separate field and study programmes provide the basis for providing academic lead-
ership for the domain.
According to Dressel and Mayhew ( 1974 ), the criteria for any specific academic
discipline are: (a) a general body of knowledge, which has logical taxonomy and
sequentially ordered knowledge areas; (b) a clearly defined and stable outer limits
that help define the scholarship of the discipline; and (c) a commonly understood
methodology of inquiry, a specialized vocabulary, a generally accepted basic litera-
ture and a body of theory and knowledge.
It is doubted whether or not higher education has a set characteristics to meet
these criteria. The authors (Dressel and Mayhew 1974 ) argued that higher education
does not possess sequentially ordered knowledge areas, but it provides, instead,
knowledge of the opinions of writers. Similarly, higher education as an emerging
field does not have a clear boundary defining issues to be studied which makes it
difficult to define the focus of the curriculum and knowledge structure in higher
education. From this perspective it is difficult to categorize higher education as a
separate field of study. Therefore, it is not surprising to find academics who believe
that higher education is not a separate field of study like many other fields of stud-
ies. ‘Clearly, higher education is not a scholarly or scientific discipline; it has no
central and accepted methodology nor does it have a set of concerns for research
study. Rather, it is a field that uses the disciplinary insights of other fields, mainly in
social sciences, to inform research themes that often require inter-disciplinary
insights’ (Altbach 2014 pp. 1319).
Despite these inherent limitations, higher education as a field of study has a long
tradition of over a century in the USA when the first graduate course on higher edu-
cation was offered by the Clark University in 1893. However, it flourished as a field
of study in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s (Fairweather 2000 ), and it emerged as
17 Education Research and Emergence of Higher Education as a Field of Study in India