Higher Education最新文献

Legislation in the 1970s, 1990s and 2003 made major changes to the status and operations of Danish universities and the role they should play in creating different imaginaries of Denmark and its place in the world. In the education literature, ‘institutional autonomy’ is key indicator of shifts in the idea and role of the university but this was not always the term used in Denmark. Instead, key terms are the ‘self-steering’ university, the ‘self-owning’ university, ‘aim and frame’ steering and ‘commando-way’ steering. The Danish words are explored ethnographically, and ‘autonomy’ is used as an analytical, not an emic, term. Whereas institutional autonomy literally means self-legislating, the analysis starts from the premise that it is never absolute: it always involves a negotiated relationship between the university and government, and these negotiations are influenced by how ‘the university’ is constituted at different times. This article focuses on changes to the legal construction of the university, its relation to government, internal organisation and leadership in different reforms. Each period will explore the ways in which the university was (or was not) ‘autonomous’, and why each new status was thought suitable for the role universities were to pay in the realisation of different visions of Denmark’s future.

Discussions about experiential education abound in the Canadian higher education sector, as well as more broadly across the international landscape. In Canada, experiential learning opportunities are increasingly embedded within institutional mission statements, administrative priorities, and pedagogical frameworks. Despite its spread, research has tended to overlook faculty perspectives, including how they make sense of experiential education and its impact on their professional roles or disciplinary priorities. To shore up these gaps, this article reports the findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews (n = 47) with faculty members across eight disciplines from six universities. Drawing on international literature on experiential education and organizational sensemaking, the findings of this study reveal four sensemaking lenses that faculty use to make sense of experiential learning: the disciplinary lens, the institutional lens, the pedagogical lens, and the professional lens. Both collectively and individually, these lenses have implications for the successful institutionalization of experiential education, as they are the frames through which faculty form meaning and enact their responses. By distinguishing these lenses, this article reinforces sensemaking as a process of bricolage and that faculty draw on multiple lenses to understand organizational changes. The article concludes with recommendations for future research on faculty sensemaking.

Internationally, the significance of the relationship between the university environment and the student experience is well-documented. In response, UK university leaders have driven forward policies that focus on estates’ expansion and regeneration. The restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity to explore questions around the importance of the materiality of campus and its impact on the student experience. This case study examines students’ experiences over time within a post-1992 UK university during the 2020/2021 academic year and makes a tri-fold contribution. First, it explores how restrictions placed on learning spaces can foreground the relationship(s) between space and learning practice. Second, through adopting a sociomateriality perspective, the paper examines students’ reactions to the top-down approach taken to Higher Education (HE) policymaking, and the potential for exposing manifestations of power within the student experience. Third, the paper illustrates how photovoice methodology can encourage reflections on the impact of materiality on the student experience. The findings reveal two principal themes: power dynamics and community participation. The authors make recommendations for university leaders to adopt a community-first, co-creation approach towards future policymaking that enables meaningful dialogue with students and educators and drives forward sustainable, inclusive change.

In US higher education, faculty members may receive an outside offer of employment from an external organization, and then receive a corresponding counteroffer from their current institution. Counteroffers are written contracts made to individuals — either prematurely in anticipation of an outside offer, but most often after an outside offer — that outline improved salary, benefits, and/or other employment conditions with the hopes of retaining them. Though the norm of the “retention offer” is pervasive in the academy, in practice it can be much more nebulous, inefficient, discretionary, and inequitable. Few studies, however, empirically examine this process. In this study, we analyze quantitative institutional and survey data collected from 650 faculty by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) to explore whether certain populations of faculty are more likely to receive counteroffers, and why. We found that women and racially minoritized scholars were less likely to receive counteroffers, and identified other factors that impact reception of counteroffers like faculty members’ desire to leave and their notification of leadership. We conclude by situating findings within extant research and offering implications for future research on counteroffers and their practice in faculty retention.

Industry worldwide calls for highly qualified STEM graduates that are ready to work. Work-integrated learning (WIL) has been implemented to address this need. WIL is a strategy to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and emphasize “employability.” However, students often perceive a confusing disconnect between their training and their workplace experience. This paper reports on a study of a graduate engineering course that uses a Communities of Practice (CoP) lens and a grounded theory approach to reconceptualize WIL. Data sources from 2017 to 2022 include 27 students’ responses from an open-ended survey and fourteen interviews with students, alumni, and employees from different construction sites that hosted students. Findings show that the articulations of the universities and companies should be centered on creating critical boundary objects and developing skills to allow students to become effective brokers. Furthermore, our analysis revealed that WIL is a bidirectional bridge where students can transfer their expertise through boundary objects from the company to the class and vice versa, becoming brokers who can participate in and mediate across the two communities. Companies should provide opportunities for Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP), where students can negotiate their increasing participation from peripheral to full members. The roles of universities, industries, students, and instructors in connecting the university and the workplace are described.

Student governments are important actors in higher education governance and also in more general political processes, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the research on student governments has thus far focused on the relations with higher education authorities and political parties, often without investigating their internal dynamics, thus risking of conceiving them as more homogeneous than they are likely to be. Analysing the internal dynamics of student governments is necessary to understand why student leaders, on behalf of their representative organisations, act and position themselves the way they do externally. This case study of the Students’ Guild at Makerere University addresses this knowledge gap by uncovering and analysing internal conflicts of student governments, contributing with new empirical and theoretical insights on students’ institutional behaviour and institutional ambiguity, in the context of authoritarian African states. While internal conflict is expected in any student government, this is anticipated to be even more the case in a conflictual context where there are strong links between students and national authorities. The approach is, in theoretical terms, based on the institutional work perspective and relies on extensive fieldwork at Makerere University. I find that the student government is far more conflictual and heterogenous than previous literature suggests. Rather than comprising representatives who act unitarily, it is characterised by intra-organisational conflicts due to competing institutional work, which reflects representatives’ multiple, diverse and divergent interests and institutional goals.

Over the past 15 years, a growing body of research into the issues care-experienced people face when accessing higher education (HE) has led to welcome support developments to attempt to redress inequalities. However, such support ceases upon completion of undergraduate degrees. Without continued support, constraints in accessing taught postgraduate study can lead to limitations in future careers, earning potential, and future stability for care-experienced people. Until now, there have been no insights into why care-experienced people wish to study at the postgraduate level, as well as whether and how they may be constrained or enabled by their care backgrounds when doing so. Using data from a qualitative longitudinal study of care-experienced graduates’ transitions out of HE, the paper illustrates how this ‘undergraduate cliff edge’ in support constrains the feasibility of progressing into and through taught postgraduate studies. The absence of often taken-for-granted support, such as a family home, means that entering postgraduate studies and facing this cliff edge is risky and perpetuates the sense of instability felt in childhood. The paper concludes by proposing recommendations for policy and practice to enable the creation of equitable opportunities to reduce risk for this group to comfortably study at the postgraduate level.

Equity is increasingly seen as a core value for higher education systems around the world. (In)equity is often measured through construction of achievement gaps, quantifying the relative outcomes of two populations of students. Institution-level gaps are embedded in the policy landscape of HE, becoming performance metrics in their own right. These gap metrics increasingly inform the actions of governments, regulators, institutions and educators. This theoretical article scrutinises the technical and conceptual construction of achievement gaps through using the dominant UK conception of the institution level degree classification ‘awarding gap’. Drawing on Adam’s Equity Theory of Motivation, Rawls’s Distributive Justice and the Capability Approach as theoretical perspectives, I highlight multiple structural weaknesses in the conception of the awarding gap. I illustrate the implications of this metric by analysing simulated awarding gap data for a fictional institution, and through the perspectives of five idealised stakeholders. I identify multiple technical and theoretical limitations of the institution level awarding gap metric, including examples where the threshold-based nature of the awarding gap fails to capture statistical differences between groups, thereby undermining its utility in identifying inequity. I call on the sector to develop metrics that more accurately capture (in)equity of outcomes and align better with theoretical frameworks, thereby creating more powerful explanatory metrics that can inform meaningful action.

Study habits drive a large portion of how university students study. Some of these habits are not effective in fostering academic achievement. To support students in breaking old, ineffective habits and forming new, effective study habits, an in-depth understanding of what students’ study habits look like and how they are both formed and broken is needed. Therefore, in this study, we explored these aspects among first-year university students in six focus group discussions (N = 29). Using a thematic analysis approach, we clustered the data in five themes: Goals Matter, Balancing Perceived Efficiency and Effectiveness when Studying, Navigating Student Life: from Structured Routines to Self-Regulation Challenges, the Quest for Effective Habits with Trying to Break Free From the Screen as subtheme, and the Motivation Roller Coaster. Findings suggest that students had different study habits depending on their goals. Students had quite accurate metacognitive knowledge about effective learning strategies for long-term learning, but often used other learning strategies they deemed most efficient in reaching their goals. Students indicated intentions to change, but did not prioritize change as their current habits enabled them to pass exams and change was not perceived as adding value. Fluctuations in motivation and transitioning to a self-regulated life hampered students’ intentions to form new and break old habits. Next to insights into factors affecting students’ behavioral change intentions, the findings suggest the importance of aligning assessment methods with life-long learning and supporting students in their long-term academic goal setting to prioritize study habits which target lasting learning to optimally foster their self-regulated learning.

Most discussions of higher education research in the last four decades have focused on expanding higher education, including increasing access, equity, and quality. However, the growth of higher education enrolment has slowed in many advanced higher education systems since the achievement of massification, with enrolment declining more dramatically in some systems than in others. South Korea (hereafter Korea), which has experienced one of the most dynamic evolutions in higher education, was recently reported to have the lowest birth rate among OECD countries, and its drastic demographic changes are significantly affecting all aspects of higher education. This paper describes Korea’s shrinking youth population and its impact on different stakeholders in Korean higher education. It also reviews and evaluates Korea’s policies in reaction to the declining population in higher education. The findings of this paper provide policy implications for countries that will experience similar challenges associated with declining enrolment in the years to come, including institutional closures, mergers, and strategies to maintain competitiveness.