In late 2007, as part of its 10th anniversary celebrations, CHET hosted a seminar in Cape Town on differentiation in African tertiary education - or more accurately, the lack of it. This is a problem hampering human development and preventing access to and the production of the range of skills across a variety of fields, types and levels that the continent needs to support its rapidly growing economies. Tertiary systems around the world have becomes less diverse and differentiated in recent decades, studies have shown. This is bad news for higher education, argued comparative education professor Frans van Vught of the University of Twente from The Netherlands. The expansion of higher education in Africa has not been accompanied by differentiation resulting, broadly speaking, in more of the same rather than greater diversity in types of institutions and learning, according to University of Nairobi professor Njuguna Ng'ethe. But, University of Oslo's Professor Peter Maassen argues that higher education worldwide is transforming in ways that could increase differentiation.

Read summaries of their papers and those of Penny Vinjevold on diversity in the tertiary system, Angina Parekh and Trish Gibbon on the 'comprehensive' university,  Jo Muller on knowledge niches and Ian Bunting on indicators for diversity.