Higher education is increasingly positioned as a private good for prospective students in England, through which they can hope to gain an economic return on their 'investment'. This paper offers new ways of thinking about the purpose of university study and the benchmarks of graduate success. Using Margaret Archer's understanding of the concept of…

While considerable evidence has accumulated on state-funded merit-based scholarships, research on the effects of specific scholarship design choices has been thin, perhaps in part because cross-state comparisons are difficult. As one of the only states to enact major changes in the design of its merit-based scholarship program, Georgia provides a…

"Racial Opportunity Cost" turns critical attention to the specific challenges faced by high-achieving students of color and gives educators a framework for recognizing and addressing these issues. Terah Venzant Chambers roots her discussion in the concept of racial opportunity cost, using a term borrowed from economics to refer to the…

Bimodal grade distributions indicate a gap in learning, where the highest quartile of students is skilful in the subject matter, but the lowest quartile is not retaining course material that demonstrates a good level of understanding. Students in the lower quartile do not necessarily have the same challenges as remedial students (i.e., those that…

Current international discourse foregrounds gender parity in education as a means of empowering women in societies with strong adherence to traditional gender norms, such as Pakistan. This discourse contends that women's access to higher education and subsequent employment enables them to identify and reject traditional cultural values and norms.…

Education systems worldwide differ in their degree of eliteness. They range from being non-elitist with dominant patterns of horizontal differentiation (e.g., Germany) to being strongly elitist and having established elite education sectors (e.g., France). Quantitatively, it remains relatively unclear how the eliteness of education systems can be…

This paper looks at the phenomenon of upward mobility through education from a comparative and historical perspective. Pierre Bourdieu referred to upwardly mobile individuals in France as the miraculous ("les miraculés"), oblates ("oblats"), or, less often, defectors ("transfuges"). A difficulty with applying a theory…

Higher Education policy researchers have highlighted the link between merit and privileged social background with respect to who is most likely to win merit-based scholarships in Universities. Yet little is known about how students from various social backgrounds may inhabit such a scholarship. In this paper, we draw on theorisations of the…

Women's leadership across the globe is often underscored by the dominance of male leadership across time. However, women leaders have made great strides in national leadership and public policy, including access and equity to higher education by underserved, underrepresented, and under-resourced populations within their respective countries. This…

This paper uses a novel data on both students' and teachers' online participation with students' administrative academic records and characteristics. The first chapter provides evidence that pre-pandemic lower-achieving students benefitted of the extra time they got during the Spring 2020 lockdown by doing more homework and completing the work…

Online collaborative learning (OCL) has become a common instructional strategy in higher education for developing students' skills in collaboration, problem-solving, and critical thinking. Cognitive engagement in OCL evolves dynamically, but we do not yet fully understand which patterns of cognitive engagement are conducive to OCL and when to…

The decisions that students make about their educational attainment have profound impacts on their future economic, demographic, and social outcomes. These decisions, however, do not happen in a vacuum. There is a long tradition of research in sociology, education, and behavioral economics that has studied inequality in educational decision making…

Blended learning is an increasingly prevalent trend in College English acquisition. This research seeks to study the influence of a blended learning environment to English acquisition, and the differences between the high-achieving learners and the low-achieving learners for Chinese minority preparation college students in English acquisition.…

The Princeton University Preparatory Program (PUPP) is a high-touch, intensive college access program aimed at providing a multiyear college preparation experience to high-achieving, low-income students in the Princeton, New Jersey, area. This report presents the theory of change and logic model of PUPP, detailing the theoretical basis for the…

In the United Kingdom, a "good" undergraduate degree is understood to be a "first class" or an "upper second class," which is achieved by three-quarters of students. The need to distinguish oneself from others is ever more important in an increasingly crowded graduate market, although a first-class degree is most…