The cross-border movement of people in higher education has been attracting scholarly attention for decades, but the definition of 'international academic mobility' bears ambiguities. This article reviews the literature on international academic mobility published in the journal "Higher Education" and beyond. By bridging the literature…

The growing importance of China as a major actor in international order has generated tremendous interest among social scientists, but scholarly debates remain in their disciplinary confines. Our study connects existing international relations research on China and the Belt and Road Initiative with two concepts in higher education…

Higher Education Institutions are expected to stimulate the innovation system and to contribute to the development of societies in a global perspective. Within this context, there is an increasing focus on internationalization. HEIs are developing institutional mechanisms to support internationalization while academics are expected to carry…

In recent decades, increasing participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has emerged as a globally shared policy objective in higher education. This policy objective is underpinned by a commitment to the economic framework of the knowledge economy and the belief that STEM education, knowledge and innovation are…

During the past two decades, PhD graduate numbers have increased dramatically with graduates viewed by governments as a means to advance the knowledge economy and international competitiveness. Concurrently, universities have also invested in policies to monitor satisfaction, retention, and timely completion--and researchers have expanded the…

This article begins with a brief review of research on the development of ideas about the knowledge-based economy (analysed here as "economic imaginaries") and their influence on how social forces within and beyond the academy have attempted to reorganize higher education and research in response to real and perceived challenges and…

The article offers a socio-economic explanation of the much-discussed proliferation of evaluations, performance indicators, rankings and ratings in higher education and research. The aim is to show that these social technologies not only restructure the word of knowledge via status competitions but also serve to align academic stratification with…

Academic mobility has existed since ancient times. Recently, however, academic mobility--the crossing of international borders by academics who then work "overseas"--has increased. Academics and the careers of academics have been affected by governments and institutions that have an interest in coordinating and accelerating knowledge…

This paper takes an innovative approach. We have used the idea of converting international evidence of the size of higher education externalities as a proportion of GDP into Australian-specific dollar equivalents and added these estimates to estimates of lifetime fiscal returns to graduates. This allows us to estimate the expected spillovers over…