The Massification of Higher Education and the Challenge of Vacant Seats in Iran: A Phenomenological Study

One of the key implications of the growing trend of higher education in Iran has been the devaluation of university education and its emergance as a phenomenon of vacant seats. Therefore, the question of this study is how the massification of higher education in Iran led to the formation of empty seats? For this purpose, the qualitative method of phenomenology was used. The community of participants in this approach included 14 higher education experts who were purposefully selected with the criterion of having lived experiences in the field of mass education of higher education and Semi-structured interviews and content analysis were performed using spiral qualitative analysis. In the context of this analysis, the framework of understanding how the phenomenon of vacant seats was formed during the mass higher education period in Iran was understood and created. This framework shows that the four key factors include the dominance of government interventionist thinking in higher education with different political, economic, justice-seeking logics, science-evasive academic management system, Academic processes incompatible with a changing social environment and a transformative quality-seeking society underlie the failure of mass education in Iran. This study can help to rethink the mass flow of higher education in Iran for Facing the phenomenon of empty seats.