Higher Education最新文献

This article provides new insights into the role played by higher education (HE) selection policies in influencing student retention by exploring drop-out patterns in Ireland and Scotland. The Irish and Scottish HE systems differ in relation to the emphasis placed on grades and subjects studied at school and to the degree of autonomy enjoyed by HE institutions in the student admissions process. We investigate whether these system differences matter for student retention using administrative data from national student records and logistic regression modelling. The findings show that in Ireland, HE students have higher chances of dropping out than in Scotland and there are inequalities in these chances among students from different social backgrounds. Moreover, the association between subject matching (but also school grades) and the chances of dropping-out is stronger in Ireland than in Scotland. We conclude that the tighter student selection criteria in Scotland improve retention and reduce social inequalities in drop-out rates. Moreover, admission criteria are found to be important not only to explain between-country differences in drop-out rates but also within-country differences among different HE institutions.

The Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST) is a questionnaire that was developed in the ’80s and ’90s with the aim of identifying the ways students study and learn in higher education institutions. It broadly classifies students as approaching their study in a deep, a strategic and/or a surface/apathetic way. A large (N=2029) dataset of the inventory was analysed in this study by using clustering algorithms and correlation analyses of students’ responses. By combining both analyses we show that, in addition to the 3 already identified and well-documented approaches, there exists a 4th approach to studying that emerges from alternative groupings of students’ responses to the items of the inventory and is supported by findings from the k-means clustering algorithm. We term this 4th approach “Dispositional Mindfulness” and find that it is an approach that is associated with gender and year of study and characterises responders to the inventory who pay attention to their present state as students, adapting to their status as higher education students rather than constantly adopting a specific approach to studying. We propose that the Dispositional Mindfulness approach is a primal entity that can be identified, in addition to the other 3 approaches, through the methodological framework that we describe herein and we note that augmenting conventional correlations with k-means clustering can deliver equally interesting findings in the analysis of educational datasets.

Although debates regarding the integration of digital technologies in higher education are far from new, the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 was considered by many as something different from the developments that had come before. This article explores how higher education institutions make sense of the potentiality inherent in artificial intelligence and the early responses to the proliferation of ChatGPT. Through a qualitative interview-based study carried out at three HEIs in Norway, and applying Scott’s (2005) three pillars of institutions as an analytical framework, the article examines the type of change pressure ChatGPT was perceived to represent in the period following its launch and the type of organizational response this perception warranted. The findings show that while it was expected that ChatGPT and related technologies not only could threaten — and potentially challenge — key norms and values in the long run, in the short term it was primarily perceived as a regulatory issue that needed to be controlled by higher education institutions. The article points to an epistemic and temporal imbalance in both the expectations and response to ChatGPT, coupled with a lack of technological competence to fully consider the kind of transformation that artificial intelligence technology potentially represents. Coupled with the sense of artificial intelligence being a “moving target”, this led higher education institutions to an initial state of organizational paralysis, in turn adopting a “wait and see” strategy.

In the twenty-first century, the growing decline and collapse of democratic student governments in higher education around the world has been paralleled by the spread of the student partnerships approach to student leadership. While attempting to foster collaboration between students and other education relevant parties, if the student partnerships approach is not implemented in a way that is cognizant of the inherent power disparities between student and non-student relevant parties, it can run the risk of supplanting student democracy with undemocratic structures in which students have no structural power to effect educational change. This article responds to attempts to deterritorialize student partnerships and student voice approaches in Cornelius-Bell, Bell, and Dollinger’s (Higher Education, 2023) article in Higher Education by adding a student power lens to demonstrate how student leadership approaches that integrate student partnerships and student voice can be implemented in ways that contribute to student empowerment and mitigate the risk of students being manipulated to serve non-students’ micropolitical goals. Political philosophy scholarship is applied to such student leadership contexts to illustrate the power imbalances between students and non-students. Two examples of healthy integrations, a liberal democratic student government and an open participation student partnership, are theorized as ways forward that can equitably and effectively garner both structural student power and mutually beneficial collaborations between relevant parties.

This study explores caste discrimination in Indian higher education through curriculum and pedagogical approaches in the classroom. Classrooms in India have not only played a significant role in knowledge production but have also been (re)-producing caste-based prejudice, discrimination, and social inequalities, both inside and outside the Indian education system. On the basis of the analysis of semi-structured interviews with 15 Dalit students, the study explores the caste dynamics operating within the classrooms of universities based in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India. The aim of the study is to understand what a ‘classroom’ means to Dalit students at a university situated in a caste-ridden hierarchical society. It seeks to determine how the pedagogical practices and curriculum play a crucial role in producing and reproducing a hierarchy of knowledge and re-enforce caste-based social inequality. The study argues that Dalit students do not passively accept their fate but tend to organise and resist caste practices in higher education. Also, they advocate for diversity in curricula and pedagogy to make higher education more accessible, inclusive, and democratic.

Via an autoethnography of internationalisation, the article highlights the ethical dilemmas transnational scholars face when universities fail to denationalise their organisational culture. Section one explains the pertinence and pitfalls of autoethnography — writing oneself into existence over against a context experienced as domination — for grasping the ethical quandaries of transnational scholars in a Japanese national university (JNU). As section two shows, the persistence of ethno-national working practices in JNUs precludes both the equal treatment of transnational scholars and the recognition of their difference. Specifically, the discussion documents two mechanisms of marginalisation at the JNU in question, Tōdai (University of Tokyo): section three links the rejection of ethno-national diversity to absolutisation, viz. the generalisation of prejudice by gatekeepers in order to stigmatise transnational scholars as unfit for organisational life; and section four contends gatekeepers defend their territorialised academic culture through normalisation, which is underpinned by academic inbreeding that produces a hermitic community of sameness blind to its ethno-national prejudices. The article concludes with the ethical gymnastics of transnational scholars situated in universities that solicit their multiplicity without renovating their ethno-national culture. It also reflects upon the limited leverage of autoethnography beyond the Anglosphere, notably in a JNU organisational environment that does not recognise the strop of agency with structure. Finally, the article suggests Japan would be better off promoting a cultural form of internationalisation rather than following a commercial iteration with neo-colonial costs.

Internships are recognized globally as a high-impact practice that substantially enhances students’ future prospects. However, concerns persist about their legality and potentially exclusionary nature. While prior research indicates participation varies based on key variables, such as gender and major, empirical work remains limited and tends to focus on univariate or single-actor explanations. We employ multi-actor models from management studies to analyze survey data (n = 1153) from 13 U.S. institutions, nine of which are minority-serving institutions (MSI). The data reveal that only 30.3% of the students participated in internships, of which 43.4% were unpaid. Linear probability analysis results indicate that contrary to expectations, individual demographic characteristics, such as gender, were not significant predictors of internship compensation on their own. Instead, academic, institutional, and employer characteristics emerged as significant predictors. Interaction analysis results highlight the combined effects of race, gender, major, MSI status, and employer characteristics in predicting participation in unpaid internships. Further, the data suggest that gender effects are largely influenced by academic major affiliation, emphasizing that unpaid internships do not uniformly affect all students but are predominant in specific sub-groups. We conclude by proposing a strategy to eliminate unpaid internships in the interest of transformative social justice work.

The denial of tenure frequently results in devastating personal and professional consequences for the individual, but scant scholarship has taken on the question of how tenure denial functions systemically. In this qualitative study of American college and university faculty, we employ the concept of structural stigma to highlight how universities and their agents assign culpability to those denied tenure in an effort to mitigate organizational risk. Findings point to examples of internalization of responsibility as well as forms of resistance among participants denied tenure.

Despite being a target of various policy interventions across developed countries, disparities in higher education participation among students from different socio-economic backgrounds remain persistent. While previous literature has outlined the processes through which parental resources can shape students’ educational decisions and pathways, the evidence remains scarce on how the effects of social origin on the participation in higher education vary along the academic performance distribution. Utilising multilevel models applied to large-scale linked administrative and survey data from Australia, this study explores how the participation in higher education varies along the students’ performance distribution by their social origins. Our results show that the effects of social origins on university participation are most pronounced in the middle of the academic performance distribution and taper off towards either end. Consideration is also given to exploring different ways to capture socio-economic status (SES) (i.e. through parental education and occupation) as an indicator of social origins. The results show that parental education serves as a better predictor of students’ university participation than does parental occupation. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for educational policies aimed at increasing university participation among individuals from low-SES backgrounds.

Universities and research institutes increasingly emphasize diversity in hiring scientists. The organizational practice of considering personal characteristics of scientists seemingly conflicts with an institutional norm of universalism in which rewards are allocated according to pre-established impersonal criteria. How do scientists view the relationship between merit and diversity in hiring? This study addresses this question through an analysis of in-depth interviews with 119 physicists and biologists in the US, the United Kingdom, India, and Italy. The results point to three broad patterns. First, most scientists regard insufficient diversity in science as a problem but not all view personal characteristics as critical to appointment processes. Second, organizational diversity initiatives generate adverse effects for underrepresented scientists and research organizations. Finally, some scientists argue that the notion of merit should be reframed to consider personal characteristics of scientists. Such patterns demonstrate how competing goals of organizational and institutional reward systems generate normative conflict in science.