Higher Education最新文献

Using a qualitative case study of the Polish higher education system, the article problematises the relationship between higher education and the public good. It emerges from an international comparative study including 11 national cases and contributes to the growing body of literature on the cultural specificities of the public good(s) in national higher education systems. Seeing the public good as a holistic ideal, transcendent to the higher education reality, it traces different meanings with which it is filled by main actors of the system: policymakers, representatives of collegial bodies, faculty and managers at two public universities (33 semi-structured interviews). The article discusses the public good in Poland in four areas: its general definition, the state’s role in higher education, and national and global contributions. Contradictions exposed in the study of Polish higher education’s discourses on the public good (national vs. global; state vs. academic community; mass higher education vs. elite higher education) serve the purpose of further elaborating the concept.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set forth by the United Nations represent a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people, enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. The SDGs have been criticized as aspirational and over-ambitious, and recent assessments suggest many of the goals may not be met by 2030. This study investigates the perceptions of Ghanaian university students regarding the attainability of the SDGs and identifies the educational and informational enablers that enhance their engagement with these goals. A total of 400 students drawn from three universities — University of Ghana (n = 200), Central University (n = 100), and University for Development Studies (n = 100) — participated in a structured questionnaire survey. The findings reveal a dual perspective among students: there is significant optimism about achieving SDGs related to quality education, gender equality, and clean water, whereas skepticism prevails regarding the goals aimed at eradicating poverty and achieving zero hunger. The study also highlights the critical role of universities as facilitators in the discourse and actions toward the SDGs. It emphasizes the potential of leveraging digital and social media to boost student engagement and calls for an integration of SDG-focused studies into university curricula. The study provides insights into the need for enhanced educational strategies and inter-institutional collaborations to prepare students effectively for their roles in global sustainability efforts. It is vital for higher education institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa, where sustainability challenges are significant and innovative solutions are often lacking, to embed SDG-focused studies into their curricula and promote student engagement in SDG initiatives.

The circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted research activities, but did not affect all academics equally. Understanding which academics were susceptible to disruptions is essential for gauging and addressing the pandemic’s systemic consequences and can yield insights into influences on research productivity more generally. Based on the survey responses of 1891 university professors in Germany, we estimate multivariate models to investigate the relevance of a comprehensive set of factors that may have shaped the pandemic’s impact. We furthermore use sample splits and an econometric decomposition technique to analyze disciplinary and gender differences. Our findings show that some factors, including additional time demands for care responsibilities and negative spillovers from disruptions of teaching activities, are of general relevance, whereas the relevance of other factors varies between groups of academics. In the natural and engineering sciences, the dependence on access to research facilities seems to have led to a more uniform negative impact of the pandemic. This apparently rendered the work environment an important influence on academics’ susceptibility to disruptions. In the humanities and social sciences, where the pandemic’s impact was more heterogeneous, individual conditions such as seniority played a notable role. Most of these factors identified as relevant were furthermore more influential among female academics, who seem to experience greater challenges with shielding their research activities from disruptions. Overall, our investigation highlights the complexity of mechanisms worth taking into account for policy and management efforts concerned with academics’ research productivity, within and outside of the context of the pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to foreground accessibility as a necessary aspect of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). We go about this by highlighting shared experiences of negotiating institutional ableism together, as a disabled scholar employed at a HEI in the UK, and a non-disabled, culturally and linguistically diverse individual employed to bridge inaccessible spaces. Drawing upon Wong’s (2023) conceptual framework of spatial belonging in higher education, which traverses the intersecting terrain of physical, digital, relational and structural spaces, we develop a postqualitative narrative demonstrating the limitations of narrowly defined legal protections that fall short of implementing inclusive ideals. The narrative draws attention to the ways that ‘access intimacy’, understood as shared commitments to accessibility, develops informally, which excuses HEIs from taking responsibility to institutionalise it. We contemplate accessibility as a relational concern and build an argument for learning from our experiences to inform the development of key accessibility considerations into institutional ways of working and relating to difference. The paper is significant for engaging principles from critical disability studies as conceptual means by which to consider accessibility, and the relational account provided contributes a collaborative perspective frequently experienced but not widely considered in higher education research for strengthening EDI.

Scholarships offer one significant pathway for higher education recovery and development in Global South contexts. Although some research exists to illustrate this significance, the case of Palestine remains virtually unresearched. This article is a first contribution to bridging this gap. It draws on qualitative data collected through interviews with and pre-existing documents from 32 Palestinian scholarship alumni and alumnae. Four experiential themes emerged through critical realist thematic analysis of this data. Two of these themes are reported in this article. First, the participants reflected a range of negative and positive motivations for pursuing their funded graduate education abroad: escaping limited opportunities in Palestine, actualizing potential, and serving Palestine. Second, they described experiencing a mix of exciting and challenging (re)adaptations while appreciating new approaches to the content and practice of their academic learning. Together with the identified participants’ demographic and academic backgrounds, these thematic findings extend global empirical evidence of the contribution of international scholarships to higher education access, recovery, and development. They also avail a useful and timely frame of reference to inform future research and practice of higher education scholarships for Palestinians.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has ignited a near universal rethink of what is tolerable or desirable in work settings. In higher education—where discontent has been exacerbated by the pandemic—the potential for a ‘great resignation’ is a very real threat. The long-term impact of a crisis management approach in universities has led to a state of ‘pandemia’, according to Watermeyer et al., (British Journal of Sociology of Education 42:651-666, 2021b), whereby academics feel alienated and subjected to a ‘toxic’ work environment that lacks shared purpose and values. This article draws on Durkheim’s notion of ‘anomie’ to explore what leads academics to leave the sector and to consider how the outward migration of staff could be addressed through changes to leadership and management practice. Evidence is taken from an online survey distributed in the United Kingdom (UK), which collected demographic information of n = 167 academics and open-text responses to a question which asked respondents to provide their reasons for quitting higher education. Four key themes emerge which elucidate a trajectory of academic anomie: (i) declining quality of academic management, (ii) the pandemic as a disruptive awakening, (iii) the erosion of values and meaning and (iv) a sense of being ‘trapped’ within academia. Potential resolutions are suggested in respect of what respondents identify as the root cause of staff attrition—toxic management culture. Collective and inclusive governance and commitment from academics at all career stages to the leadership of groups, departments, institutions and the wider higher education sector are advocated as antidotes to academic anomie.

While worldwide media increasingly cover and follow global university rankings’ (GURs) results, a concerted attempt to offer a relational knowledge/power lens underlying the mediatization of GURs remains absent. Drawing on Walter Mignolo’s (2011) “geopolitics of knowledge” concept, we analyzed the Bangladeshi national media’s coverage of Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd. rankings (between 2019 and 2021). Amid a globalized media terrain, we illuminate how the geopolitics of knowledge helps foreground ranking logics in national HE (higher education) policy discourse at the periphery of GURs outcomes (e.g., Bangladesh) through the mediatization process. We first show how Bangladeshi media foregrounds GURs as a barometer of quality and accountability to comment on the Bangladeshi HE sector’s deficits. We next demonstrate how Bangladeshi media privileges particular knowledge and authors’ experiences, thus furthering interlocal or transnational hierarchies to help recontextualize GURs in the local context. We argue that national media perpetuates the geopolitics of knowledge via GURs coverage and authorship, allowing ranking logics to be mediatized and foregrounded in national HE policy discourse in a Global South context.

Growing research evidence points towards a mental health crisis in PhD students. High-quality support services for PhD students are scarce as is research on interventions. Inspired by Conservation of Resources theory, we introduce a novel type of PsyCap intervention—a self-compassion-based PsyCap training—that aims to improve PhD students’ well-being (i.e., in terms of reducing work pressure and increasing positive affect and support seeking) through PsyCap and self-compassion. 115 PhD students in the Netherlands were randomized to a self-compassion-based PsyCap intervention, a PsyCap-only intervention, or a wait-list control group. Results indicated that the self-compassion-based PsyCap intervention increased self-compassion, reduced work pressure, and increased support seeking in the short term following the intervention. The PsyCap-only intervention increased psychological capital and reduced work pressure in the short term. Notably, increase in self-compassion was a key mechanism through which participants of the self-compassion-based PsyCap intervention, but not the PsyCap-only intervention, experienced improvements in all well-being outcomes over the longer term. Unexpectedly, the self-compassion-based PsyCap intervention increased psychological capital only at follow-up via self-compassion. This study provides initial evidence that developing PsyCap, alongside self-compassion, may take longer but benefits PhD students’ well-being and does so more than developing PsyCap alone.

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.