In this paper, we engage with the Research Excellence Framework (REF) -- the UK government's national policy tool for competitive allocation of scarce research funding. Success on the terms of the REF provides guaranteed income for UK Universities for a 6- or 7-year period -- and as a result, we suggest that the REF operates as an asset-like…

The City University of New York (CUNY) and Ithaka S+R developed a supportive credit mobility system to overcome barriers in the student transfer process. Launched in May 2020, the City University of New York (CUNY) Transfer Explorer (CUNY T-Rex) exposes course and credit-for-prior-learning (CPL) transfer rules as well as general education and…

The 1988 Dawkins reforms were designed, at least in part, to encourage public universities to organize themselves as if they were corporate enterprises, in order to create a more efficient and competitive sector that was less reliant on government funding. This paper assesses whether successive policy changes since the 1988 Dawkins reforms have…

Establishing a national university has been widely viewed by smaller developing countries as a means of asserting sovereignty and driving the country's economic, social, and cultural development. This has been particularly true in the South Pacific, despite the existence of the regional University of the South Pacific. Building a national…

As in many industrialized countries, Japan carried out a deregulation of higher education around the turn of the 21st century. This reform was based on New Public Management (NPM) principles, which should have been reflected in its most salient step: the incorporation of national universities in 2004. Although the way that the NPM principles were…

This year marks the 20th year of National Access and Finance Survey (NAFS) studies of access and funding issues in public higher education. National Council of State Directors of Community Colleges (NCSDCC) members are surveyed because of their broad knowledge of access and finance issues across education sectors and state government as well. For…

Research and Development (R&D) project managers in Higher Education must deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, competition, accountability and different objectives for professors, scientists, firms, users and other stakeholders. Formal project management frameworks are commonly adapted to support this. However, the wide range of challenges related…

In this article, I argue that technical reporting and documentation processes function to mitigate uncertainty and enable complex systems in the endeavor of big science. The argument draws on two years of field research investigating technical reporting and documentation processes at a federally funded supercomputing center dedicated to scientific…

This paper provides a critical account of the role of universities in the development of innovation and technology in Hong Kong.To do so, the paper examines the political economy of Hong Kong's innovation and technology development. It outlines a finance-led regime, under which the vision of long-term innovation initiatives is transformed into…

This paper is the first to investigate the costs of institution-wide reforms at community colleges. Drawing on data from 12 community colleges implementing comprehensive guided pathways reforms, I use the ingredients method to analyze the resources required to implement such reforms and examine their feasibility and affordability, as well as their…

This case study reveals how Qatar uses partnerships with American universities to advance its own interests and values. In partnering with Qatar, American universities have invested substantial time and manpower to aid the development of an illiberal regime that funds and befriends entities hostile to American national interests.

We explore how the influx of foreign funding into the higher education sectors of the United States and United Kingdom has raised the challenge of "reputation laundering"--when foreign donors and individuals use donations to prestigious universities to boost their international public image and offset negative images or reported…

This study is a historical investigation of the state education grants and loans system in Denmark during the period 1950-2000. Since 1952, Danish students enrolled in higher education programmes have been subsidised under a unified public financial aid scheme, with varying degrees of general coverage. During the first decades of the state support…

Education acts as an important catalyst for socioeconomic and democratic evolution in society and is a critical tool for building an equitable system. In our paper, we have historicized one of the most important educational policies, viz. Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SAMSA) in India that carries large expectations to minimize the educational divide.…

The increasing professionalisation, mixed profiles, and institutional formal recognition of research managers and administrators (RMAs), namely at higher education institutions, has led to an increasing but modest volume of academic studies focused on their professional identity, roles, functions and impact. Based on an extensive literature…