In 2014 the Icelandic government implemented a reform that reduced the time of all academic programs of upper secondary education from an average of four years in duration to three, aiming to increase efficiency in the education system. Drawing on critical policy analysis, this study explores wider consequences of the reform's enactment for higher…

Policies designed to cultivate talent within universities are central to China's strategy for reforming and improving the quality of its higher education. This study develops a goal-instrument analysis framework for a content analysis of 113 such policies. Within the context of China's Double First-Class construction, the analysis examines the…

Every province and territory in Canada has the authority to oversee higher education policies. In recent provincial and federal policy reforms, neoliberalism and academic capitalism have been gaining influence in Canadian higher education. This particularly applies to the policy reform plan "Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs," which…

The year 2017 was a landmark in Taiwanese higher education when the quality assurance mechanism transitioned from being external to internal. Given that the external quality assurance mechanism was criticised for violating the autonomy of universities, the 2017 self-accreditation policy aimed to resolve the controversy and internalise a quality…

The tension between broadening university capacity and maintaining quality is a global phenomenon. While numerous studies have analysed the enactments of various policies that aimed to address declining university quality, few have examined the underlying beliefs that define what is conceptualised as a 'quality problem' within the policy…

India, with the third largest higher education system globally, has the lowest gross enrolment ratio compared to G20 nations. The National Education Policy 2020 has made a strong recommendation to enhance the gross enrolment ratio for higher education to 50% by 2035. This figure stood at 19.4% in 2010 and 28.4% in 2021-22. The study, therefore,…

This paper presents an analysis of quality culture (QC) development in Taiwan which has recently undergone major reforms of quality assurance (QA) policies. The implementation of internal quality assurance (IQA) initiatives has been an indispensable condition to form a QC in higher education which contributes to a fundamental and comprehensive…

The term 'Global Britain' was widely used by the UK government between 2016 and 2021 to signal its ambition to reorient the nation's foreign policy on departure from the European Union. There was, however, considerable uncertainty about what the term meant beyond this, with some commentators suggesting that it denoted a de-prioritising of…

Although higher education has engaged in blended learning since the early 1990s and its benefits are well catalogued, research often focuses on individual programmes and less on how institutions envision and engage with it to enhance learning and teaching. This article provides a pre-COVID 19 pandemic snapshot of cross-institutional UK policy and…

We investigated U.S. state and national trends in the enrollment of students ages 6 to 21 years under the specific learning disability (SLD) category across 15 consecutive school years (2005-2006 to 2019-2020). We used multi-level modeling to estimate the effects of state and time on SLD enrollment and conducted a policy analysis of three states…

Academic research has extensively inspected the changing modes of governance in higher education systems through systemic and comparative research. This article aims to investigate these processes from a different perspective and vantage point. In particular, the translation of (trans)national instances into local micro-policy and practice is…

Inspired by the 'material turn' in the social sciences, education scholars have engaged in discussions on various materialist modes of policy analysis for a long time now. This paper continues these discussions by experimenting with an agential realist re-reading of the instrumentation approach originally proposed by Lascoumes & Le Gales.…

The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) is based on a quantitative and accumulative understanding of time, which increasingly frames academic practices and notions of learning in higher education (HE). By example of a recent Danish policy reform, the article explores the connections between the ECTS, new institutional…

Accountability is a critical part of achieving success in mutual goals and relationships. Throughout Asia and the Pacific, national authorities remain off track in achieving Agenda 2030, particularly Sustainable Development Goal Four (SDG4) on quality education. Persistent challenges, including the lack of data, effective measurement, and…

This dissertation is about North Dakota's political structures and culture spanning the past 30 years through a case study approach examines the modern identity of politics that derive meaning into how policies are decided upon, and ultimately, the dynamics of those policies for the state's system of higher education. Individual interviews and…