HIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY最新文献

This study investigates career trajectory and work locations of doctoral students trained in Macao and analyses how their career paths are shaped by perceived macro-level factors. Respondents from four applied disciplinary areas were selected for semi-structured in-depth interviews. Research results show that doctoral students who graduated from Macao higher education institutions enjoy good career prospects in Mainland China. Their competitiveness in the research-related job market benefits from having a multi-level support system and a training mode that promotes government–university–industry collaboration. Policies and demand from industrial sectors are involved in students' learning experience through channels such as financial support, project collaboration and networks. Doctoral students in Macao are strategic planners and actors in leveraging their human capital. As Macao becomes an emerging destination for cultivating high-level research labour, findings from this study capture a model of human capital formation in China's cross-system context.

How does studying in the United States affect Chinese doctoral engineering graduates' career decisions? The present study is based on semi-structured interviews with 16 Chinese engineering graduates who completed their doctorates in the United States, focusing on two critical aspects of their career decisions: returning to China and pursuing academic careers. First, the findings categorise Chinese doctoral engineering graduates into four types based on intention to return to China: fresh returnees, advanced returnees, hesitant stayers and resolute stayers. Second, the findings describe the reasons why they pursued academic or non-academic careers. In particular, the study explores how the graduates' learning experiences during their doctoral study in the United States affected them in terms of the research field, industry experiences, information gained and expectations about working conditions. In the decision process, it was important for doctoral students to adopt positive and open attitudes and exercise self-agency to identify the most appropriate directions for their careers. The study has contributions to the agency theory in career decision-making and social implications for international doctoral students to navigate the career decision process after completing doctoral programmes abroad.

Workplace bullying is a widespread phenomenon within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Employee tendency to remain silent is one of the most common reactions to workplace bullying. Yet, employee silence in the context of workplace bullying is poorly studied. Building on the Conservation of Resources Theory (COR) and the Learned Helplessness Theory (LHT), this study investigated employee reluctance to take action when witnessing workplace bullying (employee silence). The sample comprised 560 employees working in 20 HEIs in Ireland. Respondents filled out a survey measuring employee silence, victimisation, and team psychological safety. Results showed a negative association between team psychological safety and employee silence, indicating a reluctance to report bullying among respondents with low levels of team psychological safety. In line with the COR and the LHT, a positive association was found between victimisation and employee silence. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible actions for bullying prevention in HEIs.

This study investigates the employment landscape and career expectations of doctoral graduates in Japan through the analysis of three national surveys conducted in 2012, 2015 and 2018. The research explores the changing factors influencing graduates' employment destinations during this period, encompassing changes by discipline and proposing strategies to address challenges faced by these graduates. Unlike previous studies, which predominantly focussed on analysing data and interviewing students, this research offers both descriptive insights and analytical perspectives on Japanese doctoral education. Key findings include an increase in doctoral graduates employed in universities and the private sector, while academia employment varies by discipline. Humanities exhibit the highest academic employment, while engineering shows diverse fluctuations. Additionally, career expectations shift, with declining interest in tenure positions and growing inclination towards non-academic paths. The study identifies challenges stemming from shifting academic appeal, skill mismatches, sector concentration and field-specific hurdles, providing insights into global trends while emphasizing Japan's unique complexities.

Drawing on interviews with nine PhD students and twelve PhD graduates from a research university in Taiwan, this paper explores students' motivational profiles for pursuing a PhD at a time when that degree is increasingly decoupled from academic employment. Using self-determination theory as a conceptual lens, the paper identifies common enrolment motivations in the PhD crisis era. Amidst the doctoral enrolment crisis in Taiwan, where the traditional employment path for PhD graduates (i.e., academia) is more of a mirage than a reality, the motivations of students to pursue a PhD do not differ much from those found in the literature concerning the era of PhD expansion. Two typical motivational profiles are predominant, one dominated by the accumulation of career advantages and the other by the search for personal growth. The findings show that the first profile tends to be on the minds of most students. The second profile tends to be adopted by those who have few career concerns or those who have a greater need for self-improvement. We also find that these motivations have unique nuances, meanings and consequences for universities and doctoral education in the PhD crisis era.

Due to the increased financial pressure—exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—that students in higher education need to endure, considerable attention is being drawn towards the determinants of student financial anxiety. A conflicting picture has been captured about financial literacy, which has been shown to either be associated with better financial well-being or to be unrelated to financial stress. While discerning between financial knowledge (‘objective’ financial literacy) and perceived ability to manage personal finances (‘subjective’ financial literacy), this study also explores the impact that students' attitudes towards debt may exert on their financial anxiety. In a sample of 174 university students from the UK, we measured students' financial anxiety, objective and subjective financial literacy, attitudes towards debt and perceived impact of COVID-19 on financial behaviour. Bayesian analyses revealed that only attitudes towards debt and perception of the impact of the pandemic predicted students' financial anxiety. While the evidence in regard to financial literacy was inconclusive, mediation analyses showed that objective financial literacy indirectly impacted financial anxiety by increasing fear of debt. The findings suggest that students' financial anxiety may be reduced by adopting strategies that focus on the subjective perception of debt and of economic circumstances.

This article contributes to the growing evidence based on well-being in doctoral study. It draws on 35 qualitative, in-depth interviews to explore how the well-being of an understudied group—working doctoral student mothers—is affected when undertaking part-time PhDs. While there is a growing literature on the research student experience and an increased awareness of mental health issues in doctoral study, there has been little exploration of the experiences of part-time PhD students. Moreover, this is particularly true of mothers undertaking doctorates on a part-time basis. The experiences of this sub-group of research students constitute the gap to which this paper responds. It explores the consequences of having to straddle a number of competing domains and examines how the gender role conflict, marginalisation and lack of support experienced by doctoral student mothers impact their psychological, physical and social well-being. The article concludes with a number of recommendations that institutions may wish to consider.

This paper shows how the leading Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the UI GreenMetric World University Ranking communicate their environmental sustainability policies through their websites. Specifically, this paper analyses the presence of sustainability-related sustainable development goals on the websites of the top 100 universities in the UI GreenMetric World University Ranking (2021). In the area of university social responsibility, sustainability is less commonly communicated, hence the need to delve deeper into the presence of these messages, carrying out a descriptive study using content analysis as a form of data extraction. The conclusion is that neither position in the ranking nor geographic area are decisive for developing better communication about sustainability. In terms of content, sustainability features on the websites are in three key dimensions of the communication of HEIs worldwide (Climate change, Efficiency of sustainable cities and communities and Striving for peace and justice). Thus, the areas for improvement are around the positioning of this sustainability-related content on their home pages, improving location and format (especially video). Moreover, reinforcing reputational messages, through plans or programmes, as well as improving engagement working on the multi-directionality to other social media, is required.

This study focuses on student resilience during the COVID-19 crisis, a key factor for students' progress, and future careers. It does so by introducing the job demands and resources (JDR) model, and the social exchange theory (SET), widely adopted in the management literature in the education field to better understand student experience management in the higher education context. In past research, limited attention has been given to student resilience through the lens of management theories such as JDR and SET, and college support as a factor that develops student resilience has been scarcely observed. Data were collected from 1435 students in a large Irish university during the lockdown period due to COVID-19 in 2020. The findings reveal that college support, as a resource, develops students' resilience (even in the presence of higher study demands), which in turn decreases their affective response to crisis, and increases their adaptive study performance, and commitment to the move to online learning. This research suggests that colleges need to balance their support and demands towards students during the crisis in facilitating students to develop their own resilience and provides valuable insights for higher education sector to develop students' resilience during crisis.

Whilst China has become home to the second largest doctoral education system in the world, with over 20% of its doctoral graduates taking up postdoctoral researcher positions inside and outside of China, a lack of information regarding the expectations of these doctoral graduates in pursuing postdocs has resulted in a failure to meet their expectations, leading to insufficient institutional support for their career development. In order to improve this situation and provide more tailored institutional support for Chinese postdocs, we conducted interviews with 30 doctoral graduates from elite Chinese universities from February 2020 to December 2021 to understand their expectations for and experiences of postdocs. The data identified four expected-to-accumulated capitals during postdoc experiences: personal scientific capital, discipline-related social capital, institution-related social capital and family-related social capital. Among these, the primary consideration for engaging in postdocs is to enhance personal scientific capital in both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Chinese doctoral graduates who choose domestic postdocs have higher expectations for increasing institution-based social capital, while those who go abroad expect to develop discipline-related social capital within the international academic community. Understanding these expectations will be instrumental in developing optimal approaches to providing institutional support for the career development of Chinese postdocs.