Many countries are struggling to reconcile greater flexibility in school choice with the need to ensure quality, equity and coherence in their school systems. This report provides an international perspective on issues related to school choice, especially how certain aspects of school-choice policies may be associated with sorting students into…

The state school lives immersed in the tension between democratic purposes and the ideals of merit and selectivity. In this context, state schools establish instruments of public praise for students who stand out academically or in other dimensions. We propose to map the rituals of academic distinction in Portuguese state schools and to discuss…

This article explores the role of school staff in the accessibility of education with a focus on professional discretion and its relation with institutions and contexts. Drawing on the street-level bureaucracy approach it looks into different types of discretionary practices and asks how their legitimacy influences their success. The analysis is…

In this article institutional and structural factors relating to access to education are assessed. First, the macro frameworks of institutional regulation that exert influence on the educational trajectories of young Europeans are demonstrated. Based on different aspects of these frameworks and drawing from extant research, the article presents a…

The origins of the registrar's office are complex. According to common tradition, the registrar was, or evolved from, the office of the beadle (sometimes referred to as "bedel") in the medieval university. This tradition is incorrect; the story is more complex. The beadle sometimes performed functions similar to those performed by the…

Over the last decades, many liberal democracies have experienced a tension between the education system's expressed requirement to foster citizenship norms and the liberal (sub-)ideal of norm neutrality. This dilemma has been accentuated by, on the one hand, increased ethnical and cultural diversity and, on the other hand, liberalization of…

This 2012 mba.com Prospective Students Survey Report explores the motivations, behaviors, program choices, and intended career outcomes of individuals who expressed a desire to further their education in a graduate business program. More than 16,000 prospective business school students who registered on mba.com shared their opinions, preferences,…

This book analyses the debate on the structure of higher education in Germany, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and Australia during the past 3 decades. Structural patterns or models are systematized and the way in which different countries have solved their problems in organizing higher education are…

Undergraduate student mobility in Europe, which is seen as a desirable objective by the European communities, is examined in this study. The idea of mobility includes a term or year of study in a foreign country as well as stays of a month or two resulting from inter-university agreements or twinning schemes, or even periods of training that round…

The roles of exit examinations (high school exit) and college entrance examinations in four industrialized countries are described. Information was obtained from reviews of educational systems and interviews with small samples of students (at least seven or eight students), parents, and teachers during 1993. All four countries studied, Japan,…