Higher EducationPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2025-03-04DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01415-1
Morten Hansen
{"title":"Thinking with and between social orders: Corporate embedded colleges and their public rivals.","authors":"Morten Hansen","doi":"10.1007/s10734-025-01415-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10734-025-01415-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Scholars have argued that corporatisation is antithetical to higher education's educational purposes. In this article, I complicate such claims by considering how higher education institutions develop concrete alternatives once a private coordination mode emerges as the dominant order. I also aim to show how we can use concrete practices and their content, purpose and structure to reveal alternatives to current market forms. By drawing on pertinent interviews and documents, I undertake a comparative analysis of the order of England's corporate embedded colleges. Corporate embedded colleges are run by private companies in partnership with public universities. The purpose is to recruit and train international students for university preparatory programmes. I compare these colleges with three rival public orders: the University Pathways Alliance, in-house programmes, and the Northern Consortium. I proceed by thinking with and between these social orders. The goal is to help imagine alternatives to the corporate market for such colleges. I conclude that universities can learn from the private order and perhaps even outcompete its representatives if they cooperate and make full use of their institutional distinctiveness.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"91 1","pages":"245-266"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12891029/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146182963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2025-10-17DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01548-3
Philippe Saner, Katja Rost
{"title":"Competition for students in the digital era: scientific disciplines as drivers of study program innovation in Swiss higher education.","authors":"Philippe Saner, Katja Rost","doi":"10.1007/s10734-025-01548-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10734-025-01548-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Competition between universities has become more intense and multilevel in recent years. Whereas previous studies have mainly looked at multilevel competition in research, this paper investigates competition among universities in academic teaching related to digital transformation. We use a database of study programs on digitalization offered by Swiss universities between 2017 and 2023 to examine the levels at which competition for students occurs. Results show that most competition is found within scientific disciplines, with weaker forms of competition observed at the university, canton, and university type levels. The number of digitalization-related study programs offered in a discipline at a specific university increases significantly if the number of such programs increases in that discipline at other universities. The findings suggest that disciplines are significant drivers of new degree programs in digitalization because program innovation happens at the department and faculty levels rather than the university level. Although all types of universities are positioning themselves for digital transformation in teaching, universities of applied sciences are proving particularly entrepreneurial in creating new offerings. The study highlights that competition for students is intensifying due to digitalization, changing student demands, and demographic trends, which may lead to a new market segmentation in which universities increasingly specialize in disciplines in which they excel.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"92 2","pages":"751-779"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13582144/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148992001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2025-07-15DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01466-4
Camilla Gaiaschi
{"title":"Breaking the glass door in academia? Looking at the role of scientific fields and contextual factors in moderating the gender gap in recruitment: evidence from Italy.","authors":"Camilla Gaiaschi","doi":"10.1007/s10734-025-01466-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10734-025-01466-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Women's presence in academia has sharply increased in recent years, but gender inequalities in career progression persist. Italy makes no exception to this trend as different studies on the promotion gap to associate and to full professors have suggested. However, no measure of the adjusted gender differential in the previous steps of the career, that is in the transition from the post-doc to the assistant professor position, has been provided so far. This paper aims to fulfill this gap by means of an original, longitudinal, and multi-source dataset on the Italian academic population which has allowed to measure the female disadvantage in recruitment by controlling for a large set of confounding characteristics including individual productivity and, most especially, contextual factors, which have been under-explored so far. Results suggest that women face a small adjusted penalty, of around 3-4%, in academic recruitment. However, when disentangling the analyses by scientific field, strong differences emerge, with the gap reaching a maximum of - 10% in physics while being non-significant in many SSH. Within the STEMM, the life sciences, driven by medicine and biology, appear more gender unequal than many hard sciences. Moreover, a growing number of female full professors in the sub-field and working in a department with good financial resources represent two factors that have a moderate role in reducing the gap. All in all, this work sheds light on the importance of organizational and institutional factors in explaining the gender gap thus calling for structural interventions to make universities more inclusive towards women.</p><p><strong>Supplementary information: </strong>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10734-025-01466-4.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"91 3","pages":"1199-1222"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13038771/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147610292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01592-z
Yusuf Damilola Olaniyan
{"title":"Rural student mobility and the spatial politics of university access in Nigeria.","authors":"Yusuf Damilola Olaniyan","doi":"10.1007/s10734-025-01592-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01592-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite the post-independence reforms aimed at addressing educational inequalities in university access in Nigeria, figures for rural students have not improved. While policy frameworks such as the quota system and centralised examinations are routinely celebrated as instruments of fairness, they have not translated into substantive equity for rural students. This research provides a novel understanding and explanation of how rural Nigerian students choose and access university education. It drew on 45 in-depth interviews across three federal universities in Nigeria. The study found two interrelated mobility logics that influenced rural students' choice of university: staying close to home (primary sorting), shared identity and the boundaries of belonging (secondary sorting). It also found institutional barriers influencing access: Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and post-JAMB examination. Guided by a postcolonial lens, the analysis draws on Mamdani's theory of decentralised despotism to show how colonial governance structures continue to shape Nigeria's internal geographies of access. This is complemented by Bourdieu's concept of habitus, used to understand how spatial and symbolic inequalities are embodied in students' educational choices. The study argues that access should be understood not as a single point of entry but as a contested and layered journey. It calls for policies that move beyond increasing enrolment to address the invisible borders, spatial hierarchies, and infrastructural gaps that shape who moves, where they go, and under what conditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"92 3","pages":"1673-1692"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13633237/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149116790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-10-18DOI: 10.1007/s10734-024-01332-9
Paul Ashwin
{"title":"Transformational accounts of students' undergraduate education are evoked by their engagement with knowledge.","authors":"Paul Ashwin","doi":"10.1007/s10734-024-01332-9","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10734-024-01332-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There are strong concerns about students perceiving their undergraduate education in instrumental, rather than transformational, ways. However, it is not clear whether seeing education instrumentally undermines students' capacity to see their education as transformational. Based on data from a 7-year longitudinal study of chemical engineering students from three countries, this article shows that all students focused on instrumental outcomes from education in their first year of study. However, by their final year, students tended to give instrumental accounts of what they had gained from their overall university experience and transformational accounts of what they had gained from studying their subject. This suggests that, depending on the context evoked, most students can describe instrumental or transformational relationships to their education. However, developing transformational accounts on their education appeared to be dependent on studying knowledge-rich degrees that supported them to engage with the world from the perspective of a particular body of knowledge. This raises serious questions about educational policies that imply that instrumental outcomes are the most important outcomes from students' educational experiences as such policies obscure the importance of transformational knowledge-focused relationships that change the way that students engage with the world.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"90 2","pages":"479-495"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12413339/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145015240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-11-06DOI: 10.1007/s10734-024-01333-8
Peter Wingrove, Beatrice Zuaro, Marion Nao, Dogan Yuksel, Levente Littvay, Anna Kristina Hultgren
{"title":"University autonomy is a predictor of English medium instruction in European higher education.","authors":"Peter Wingrove, Beatrice Zuaro, Marion Nao, Dogan Yuksel, Levente Littvay, Anna Kristina Hultgren","doi":"10.1007/s10734-024-01333-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10734-024-01333-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite extensive research into English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in higher education, few if any studies have explored the role of higher education autonomy in driving EMI. This paper tests the novel hypothesis that university autonomy-spearheaded across European higher education through neoliberally predicated 'steering at a distance' reforms-predicts EMI. The data are multilevel with higher education institutions (HEIs) nested inside education systems. The University Autonomy Scorecards (Pruvot & Estermann, 2017) operationalise university autonomy at the education-system level (<i>n</i> = 26) and measure four dimensions of autonomy: academic, financial, staffing, and organisational. We include 'overall autonomy' as the average. The European Tertiary Education Register provides HEI-level data (<i>n</i> = 1815), which we combine with a count of English-taught degree programmes (ETPs) to measure EMI, provided by Study Portals, the largest online portal of degree programmes. We conduct multilevel regression to analyse the relationships between autonomy and EMI. The results showed that overall autonomy predicts EMI in public universities (<i>p</i> = 0.002). Increasing overall autonomy by one point above the mean increases the likelihood of offering EMI by 9.5%. Academic, staffing, and organisational autonomy predict EMI in public universities, whereas financial autonomy does not. The first to quantify a relationship between university autonomy and EMI, this study offers new insights into how EMI comes about. By revealing a previously obscured interconnectedness between language shift and higher education governance, the study demonstrates the value added of an interdisciplinary approach and proposes a new line of inquiry for future research.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"90 2","pages":"497-520"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12413410/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145015278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-09-26DOI: 10.1007/s10734-024-01309-8
G E Derrick, J Robson, A Oancea, X Xu, M R Stan
{"title":"The gravity of the status quo: the response of research governance to system-level shocks.","authors":"G E Derrick, J Robson, A Oancea, X Xu, M R Stan","doi":"10.1007/s10734-024-01309-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10734-024-01309-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Using interviews with global research stakeholders, this research explores how stakeholders within research-system-level research governance organisations conceptualised, responded to, and reasoned the realities of disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they positioned procedural changes to their governance mechanisms. Given that system shocks present critical challenges to established practices and embedded institutional norms, we use neo-institutional theory as a heuristic device to examine the relationship between the exogenous shock of COVID-19, trajectories of institutional norms and cultures, and the role institutional stakeholders play in managing responses. Across all the research systems studied (with particular focus on the UK, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, Hong Kong SAR, and Italy), participants were concerned about how the shock provided by COVID-19 had both revealed and entrenched deep inequalities inherent in their research systems and globally. There were tensions in how participants centralised the concept of the 'normal' as part of a process of recovery permeating all system-level responses, often with a sense of <i>wistful affection</i> for pre-pandemic structures, modes of operation, and embedded norms. Aspirations for short-, medium,- and long-term plans for research change echoed a dependency on returning to 'normal' and an inevitable pull of the norms of the pre-pandemic status quo. Despite the desire to 'build back better', the pull of institutional norms and the gravitational force of the status quo appeared too strong for meaningful change in recovering research systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"90 1","pages":"89-108"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12317853/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144785680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-12-21DOI: 10.1007/s10734-024-01379-8
Zhiyun Bian
{"title":"Human capital and socialism builders: a happy marriage? Analysing the construction of 'high-level talent' in Chinese higher education policy.","authors":"Zhiyun Bian","doi":"10.1007/s10734-024-01379-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01379-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper employs critical discourse analysis to investigate the construction of 'high-level talents' within China's Double First-Class Project, an educational initiative implemented in 2015 to establish first-class universities and disciplines and cultivate high-level talents. The study examines the juxtaposition of human capital discourse and the political concern of 'socialism builders and inheritors' as articulated in key policy texts, including President Xi Jinping's speeches and various government documents. It investigates how the global discourse of human capital has been recontextualised within Chinese higher education policy, highlighting the tensions and negotiations between economic objectives and ideological imperatives. The findings reveal a hybrid discourse-'high-level talents with Chinese characteristics'-that reflects the Chinese Communist Party's strategy in crafting its narrative to negotiate compliance with global policy discourses while strengthening its governing power in an increasingly globalised, economic, and individualising world. This study contributes to the understanding of how global educational ideologies are localised, offering insights into the implications for students' educational choices and identities within the framework of China's socio-political landscape.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"90 5","pages":"1329-1346"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12662905/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145649773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-11-12DOI: 10.1007/s10734-024-01356-1
Eliel Cohen, Kate Williams, Jonathan Grant
{"title":"Researcher identities and values in the impact agenda: the case of artificial intelligence academics.","authors":"Eliel Cohen, Kate Williams, Jonathan Grant","doi":"10.1007/s10734-024-01356-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01356-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A major shift in the research sector has been the increased expectation from policymakers and funders that academic research should yield some socioeconomic benefits or 'impacts' rather than merely new knowledge. In this paper, we explore the role that impact has in academics' motivations and values and how impact is being integrated into academics' core functions of research and education. We do this through in-depth interviews (<i>n</i> = 60) with scientists who work on the development or application of artificial intelligence (AI), broadly defined. This AI's focus situates our participants within a strategically important, high-priority area of research for all three national contexts included in our study-Australia, the UK and the USA. Our findings reveal that the impact mission has become central to understanding the motivations and values of academics, but unevenly. We identify divergence between those who work on AI from a foundational computer science perspective and those who develop and apply AI within other scientific domains. The two groups have different understandings of key notions such as 'impact' and 'applied research', as well as different ways of integrating the impact agenda into their research and education activities. The study highlights the importance of flexible approaches to research policy and governance that are based on a deeper understanding of what motivates researchers, and that take into account academics' educational role. Greater holistic understanding of how academic identities and practices are accommodating the impact agenda is essential to maximise synergy across activities and avoid unintended consequences.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"90 3","pages":"881-897"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12491082/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145233776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Higher EducationPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-12-14DOI: 10.1007/s10734-024-01365-0
Katie E Rakow, Michael Priestley, Nicola C Byrom, Juliet L H Foster, Eleanor J Dommett
{"title":"Their wellbeing affects our wellbeing: student perspectives of lecturer wellbeing and its consequences for student wellbeing.","authors":"Katie E Rakow, Michael Priestley, Nicola C Byrom, Juliet L H Foster, Eleanor J Dommett","doi":"10.1007/s10734-024-01365-0","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10734-024-01365-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A \"whole university approach\" has been recommended for addressing concerns about the wellbeing of UK university lecturers and students. Previously, staff wellbeing has been explored from staff perspectives. Student wellbeing has been explored from the perspectives of both students and staff. However, little research has been conducted on student perspectives on staff wellbeing and its possible impact on students. Addressing this gap, this study explored student perceptions of their lecturers' wellbeing and ways that it can impact on student wellbeing. Three themes were identified from the thematic analysis of 9 focus groups with 41 undergraduate students. First, students notice their lecturer wellbeing, particularly if they have the opportunity to interact with their lecturers. Second, students perceive that their lecturers' wellbeing can be affected by university policies and practices, student behaviours, and external factors. Third, lecturer wellbeing and student wellbeing are often reciprocal, emphasising the importance of lecturer-student interactions. These findings have implications for a whole university approach, namely development of university practices that support sufficient time for constructive lecturer-student interactions, such as timetabling, allocation of administrative tasks, class size and staffing levels.</p><p><strong>Supplementary information: </strong>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10734-024-01365-0.</p>","PeriodicalId":48383,"journal":{"name":"Higher Education","volume":"90 4","pages":"1065-1082"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12592275/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145483358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}