This work analyses how political economic shifts contribute to competition within higher education systems in the US, EU, and Canada. The authors highlight competition for prestige and public and private subsidies, exploring the consequences of these processes through theoretical and empirical analyses. Accordingly, the work highlights topics that will be of interest to a wide range of audiences. Concepts addressed include stratification, privatization of formerly public subsidies, preference for “high tech” academic fields, and the vocationalization of the curriculum (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: [STEM] fields, selected professions, and business) rather than the liberal arts or the Humboldtian vision of the university. Across national contexts and analytic methods, authors analyze the growth of national policies that see universities as a sub set of economic development, casting universities as corporate research laboratories and education as central to job creation. Throughout the volume, the authors make the case that national and regional approaches to politics and markets result in different experiences of consequences of academic capitalism. While these shifts serve the interests of some institutions, others find themselves struggling to meet ever-greater expectations with stagnant or shrinking resource bases.

This work analyses how political economic shifts contribute to competition within higher education systems in the US, EU, and Canada. The authors highlight competition for prestige and public and private subsidies, exploring the consequences of these processes through theoretical and empirical analyses. Accordingly, the work highlights topics that will be of interest to a wide range of audiences. Concepts addressed include stratification, privatization of formerly public subsidies, preference for “high tech” academic fields, and the vocationalization of the curriculum (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: [STEM] fields, selected professions, and business) rather than the liberal arts or the Humboldtian vision of the university. Across national contexts and analytic methods, authors analyze the growth of national policies that see universities as a sub set of economic development, casting universities as corporate research laboratories and education as central to job creation. Throughout the volume, the authors make the case that national and regional approaches to politics and markets result in different experiences of consequences of academic capitalism. While these shifts serve the interests of some institutions, others find themselves struggling to meet ever-greater expectations with stagnant or shrinking resource bases.

Unequal Higher Education identifies and explains the sources of stratification that differentiate colleges and universities in the U.S. Taylor and Cantwell map the contours of this system, identifying which higher education institutions occupy which status positions at any given point in time, and explain the factors that support and extend this system of unequal higher education.

How do the benefits of higher education compare with its costs, and how does this comparison vary across individuals and institutions? These questions are fundamental to quantifying the productivity of the education sector. The studies in Productivity in Higher Education use rich and novel administrative data, modern econometric methods, and careful institutional analysis to explore productivity issues. The authors examine the returns to undergraduate education, differences in costs by major, the productivity of for-profit schools, the productivity of various types of faculty and of outcomes, the effects of online education on the higher education market, and the ways in which the productivity of different institutions responds to market forces. The analyses recognize five key challenges to assessing productivity in higher education: the potential for multiple student outcomes in terms of skills, earnings, invention, and employment; the fact that colleges and universities are “multiproduct” firms that conduct varied activities across many domains; the fact that students select which school to attend based in part on their aptitude; the difficulty of attributing outcomes to individual institutions when students attend more than one; and the possibility that some of the benefits of higher education may arise from the system as a whole rather than from a single institution. The findings and the approaches illustrated can facilitate decision-making processes in higher education.

This year’s edition brings together research and essays on comparative education trends and directions written by professional and scholarly leaders in the field. Topics covered include theoretical and methodological developments, reports on research-to-practice, area studies and the diversification of comparative and international education.

This volume of Theory and Method in Higher Education Research contains analyses and discussions of, amongst others, topic modelling, geometric data analysis,creativity and playfulness, longitudinal network analysis, grounded theory methods and autonetnography.

Knowledge is now central to national economic competitiveness and to socio-economic endeavours concerned with inequalities and social exclusion, and in this context higher education is recognized as a core sector of national policy and strategy. Yet the changing pressures, directions and practices in relation to knowledge pose many challenges for higher education itself. How can and how should research and study programs within higher education align with wider knowledge dynamics? How can higher education prepare students in professional fields for different kinds of knowledge-intensive work practices? How can short term economic objectives for higher education be aligned with other kinds of knowledge objectives that have characterized universities and colleges, and with the intensified impact of global rankings? This book takes as its focus the core interest of higher education in knowledge, and takes as its object of inquiry the kinds of reconfiguration of knowledge evident in national policies and governance; and in the redevelopment and practices of a range of professional and academic study programs in higher education institutions in Norway and Australia. From these detailed accounts, the book demonstrates the complexity of knowledge as an object of policy and practice; the competing logics that may be evident within and between study programs and policies; and the different kinds of agents and drivers that are part of knowledge reconfiguration in higher education and that need further attention going forward.

*Winner of the Best Book Award from Researchers and Students and Study Abroad Programmes at the CIES2019 conference 2019 This book examines learning-mobility tensions and ties caused by convergences and divergences of social, organizational and cognitive forces in global higher education. As some of these forces generate status anxiety, and others enhanced self-worth, this volume asks the questions: How can students navigate treacherous education markets to reduce the former and increase the latter? Which specific forces and confluences enhance the quality of self-discovery? Does the search for identity and meaning produce better results when conducted internationally? Which transformative drivers of global mobility enhance social mobility? What allows some students to gain the capacity for impactful higher learning at a time when others lose it? Why are strategically minded students increasingly concerned about equality and the quality of contribution to the common good of education, rather than about their own status? What makes some places of learning stand out when students recount their journeys of self-discovery and roads to self-worth? This book includes a broad range of stories and firsthand perspectives that are often overlooked in the process of internationalization of higher education. The narratives offer important insights to consider, given the ever-increasing disquiets of competitiveness-oriented global higher education.

"This work provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary leadership scholarship that examines how leadership is conceptualized within higher education"--