Higher education expansion with emphasis on social impact: a grounded theory approach

University, as an achievement of modern world, has experienced broad range of changes like quantitative expansion of higher education institutions and increasing number of students in different majors. Simultaneously, with this global phenomenon, the context of Iranian higher education had same changes as well. The university, in the form of a social institution, has social implications after entering various contexts which many of them are not visible and measurable by quantitative indicators. Therefore, to understand the social implications of quantitative expansion of higher education, a theory based interpretation research method was designed. A qualitative research approach, grounded theory methodology, and unstructured- interviews were applied. In this research, 54 informers from three groups of social activists, university students and faculties in three province of Guilan, Ghom, and Sistan and Baluchistan were participated. The results showed that increasing access to higher education as a public demand, generational accumulation and constitution was the initiator of quantitative expansionary policies in Iran. According to participant's points of view, these policies resulted in improving people conciseness, urban development, significantly lowering the quality of higher education, changes on life style, devalue of degree and university, inefficient human resources cricis and increasing regional unemployment which known as social consequences of higher education expansion