HIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY最新文献

This paper examines how researchers make sense of the dominant valuation regimes in the context of career assessment, especially academic recruitment. It also asks what changes researchers envision, especially what areas of academic work are under-recognised. Universities' assessment systems are important because they encourage researchers to focus on certain activities and outputs. Dominant ways of assessment have been criticised for their emphasis on scholarly publications and the use of research metrics. Based on interviews of researchers in a Finnish university, the findings show that researchers put high value on research contributions. Researchers below the top academic hierarchy pointed to the underestimation of teaching and societal engagement, often seeing a mismatch between what they did and valued in daily work, and what contributions were rewarded by the organisation. The study contributes to ongoing discussions on reforming researcher assessment, pointing to differences between researchers positioned at higher and lower academic career stages.

This 5-year research project was based on an NSF S-STEM research grant (1742118) focused on student veteran education and workforce preparation. We addressed STEM workforce and defence community needs by providing targeted scholarships and support for veteran students pursuing engineering degrees. Our aim was to enhance the workforce by improving access and success rates through financial and institutional support, while developing evidence-based practices for recruitment, retention and graduation of student veterans. Through targeted interventions, we examined obstacles student veterans face in education and in engineering programs and increased their sense of camaraderie, career awareness, engineering identity, professional development, financial security and engineering self-efficacy. Our targeted intervention was successful on all six factors. We provide implications for practice, policy and research, as well as future research areas to continue this important work.

This paper introduces a novel four-dimensional analytical framework to examine how universities are positioned within national artificial intelligence strategies amid intensifying geopolitical competition. Through systematic document analysis of policy frameworks across eight major global actors—the United Kingdom, Russia, India, the European Union, China, the United States, BigTech, and UNESCO—we identify distinct governance typologies that determine higher education's role in artificial intelligence ecosystems. Our findings quantify significant variations in how universities are instrumentalized across governance contexts—from talent pipelines in market-led systems to state-directed innovation hubs in centralised approaches. We document the emergence of value-aligned ‘strategic education blocs’ replacing universal academic networks, with India demonstrating unexpected leadership in education-specific policy provisions. This research advances the theoretical understanding of “technological statecraft” in higher education, demonstrating how the interplay between sovereignty concerns, regulatory philosophies, value systems, and public-private dynamics creates systematically different operating environments for universities across geopolitical contexts. These findings provide critical benchmarks for understanding institutional positioning in the global artificial intelligence landscape and challenge conventional internationalisation frameworks in an era of technological nationalism.

We examine the role of institutional knowledge brokers in bridging higher education research (HER) and higher education policy, focusing on a parliamentary advisory body in Israel. Using citation and topic analysis, supplemented by stakeholder interviews, we investigate the topics addressed, sources of evidence utilised and perceptions of different forms of evidence. Findings reveal the limited influence of HER on advisory outputs, with governmental sources dominating the evidence base. The marginal role of HER is linked to perceptions of its limited timeliness, theoretical focus and perceived ideological biases. We highlight the inherent tensions faced by institutional knowledge brokers operating in political contexts, where navigating the demands for neutrality and relevance often limits their ability to engage with contentious or systemic issues. This challenge is particularly acute in the contemporary context, where academic knowledge production itself has become increasingly contested and a focal point of public and political polarisation. This study underscores the persistent challenge of integrating HER into policy and emphasises the need for more effective strategies to enhance the impact of scholarly research on policymaking. While grounded in the situated context of Israel's parliamentary advisory system, our findings illuminate tensions in the research–policy interface that may resonate beyond this setting.

‘Students as consumers’ has become the dominant discourse applied to English undergraduate students in the United Kingdom. This construction by policymakers is linked to the marketisation of higher education and the increased financial contribution of English students towards their studies. However, the construction of students as consumers, from their perspectives, has received little empirical attention. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with English undergraduates in England and Scotland, this article argues that while policymakers construct students as consumers, students do not enact this uniformly. The degrees to which their discourses and practices present aspects of consumerism, instrumentality and passivity vary considerably and are enacted in different combinations according to the number of contact hours on a course, and socio-economic and education backgrounds. This article provides a comprehensive picture of students in a marketised system and shows how ‘students as consumers’ impacts students' discourses and practices, informing higher education management and policymakers about its potential consequences.