Employability development has become a central concern of higher education, with many students attending university to enhance their employability and career development. Universities offer a range of curricular, co-curricular and extracurricular employability-building activities, including work-integrated learning, mentoring and career…

Across Europe, assumptions are often made within the academic literature and by some social commentators that students have come to understand the purpose of higher education (HE) in increasingly instrumental terms. This is often linked to processes of marketisation and neo-liberalisation across the Global North, in which the value of HE has come…

Undertaking a PhD is a challenging endeavour. Pursuing a doctoral education in a "foreign" context tends to increase the demands of this intellectual venture. The nature of research-based PhD programmes, often characterised by a lack of formal curricula where academic supervision lasts several years, may add another layer of complexity.…

It is a major commitment to undertake doctoral study but relatively little is known about what motivates students to enrol or what they subsequently see as the benefits they have gained and they costs accrued. This report on a study of alumni who completed theses in Education in 1992, 1997 and 2002 in the UK argues that although the doctorate…