This paper examines the drivers for knowledge exchange in British research-intensive universities, at a time when research impact is coming to be seen as an increasingly important outcome of research in all disciplines. It provides evidence of an over-emphasis of the economic benefits of knowledge exchange in the policy sphere and of a quite…

Higher education institutions take strategic decisions regarding their engagement with government policy, with choice of strategy structured by the character of the national system and notions of what is appropriate in given contexts for the institution. In this study a series of factors influencing institutional strategy in response to the higher…

Proliferating excellence gold standards in the global academic system tend to obscure the far-reaching diversification of academic missions, practices, ambitions and identities brought by massification. This article approaches this topic by a review of theory on academic scholarship and how it has changed in the wake of academic massification and…

This paper compares four short- and medium-term strategies available to public higher education to balance budgets in the face of major cutbacks in public funding. These strategies include: capping enrolments, changing the enrolment mix, raising prices and increasing enrolments without raising prices. The paper assesses the likely effects of these…

The Bologna Process put in motion a series of reforms for higher education. In Germany, the "Bologna reform" focused national standards and guidelines which served as criteria for obligatory programme accreditation by external bodies. This article reports on the results of an empirical study that examined the effects and limitations of…

Given that higher education systems everywhere have opened to the masses, this paper analyses to what extent this phenomenon has really been accompanied by an effective democratisation of access and success in Portugal and Brazil. It looks at the expansion of higher education and discusses how the political system and higher education institutions…

Smaller universities may produce research which is on a par with larger, elite establishments. This is confirmed by a recently developed mathematical model, supported by data from British and French higher education research-evaluation exercises. The detailed nature of the UK system, in particular, allows quantification of the notion of critical…

This paper analyses a higher education policy issued in China in 2002: the Quality Assessment of Undergraduate Education Policy. The policy was designed with four main objectives: improvement, compliance, information and accountability. However, it has not completely fulfilled its objectives, especially regarding improvement and accountability,…

Bologna reform eulogies and protests tend to focus on the benefits and shortcomings of the new two-tier curricula, their implementation and orientation. In this article, an assessment of the Bologna reforms is made in terms of their larger and less widely discussed systemic and institutional effects--which go far beyond the original reformers'…

How do European universities organise the knowledge transfer (KT) task? We consider the institutional organisation of knowledge transfer as encompassing 1) the knowledge transfer office structure, i.e. the way universities have embedded and organise their KT activities, 2) the focus towards the KT task, linked to the KT strategy, and 3) the KT…

Within weeks of taking office, Australia's new Labor government commissioned two major reviews--one of Australia's innovation system and one of Australian higher education. Taken together, these reviews will have major implications for the future of research and teaching in Australia for decades to come. This paper discusses the main…

This article analyses the innovation agenda of the European Union (EU), places it in the context of globalisation and explores its foundation in the theoretical innovation systems perspective. It analyses a number of the central policy domains of this agenda: higher education, doctoral education, research and knowledge transfer. In the second part…

Since the mid 1980s, modernising university governance has been a constant item on the political agenda of most countries, often followed by reforms attempting to change how universities are managed and led. However, when considering the effects of the many initiatives taken, a rather complex picture appears with respect to the scope and depths of…

Higher education in the United States has received much scrutiny in the recent past from the federal and state governments, the press and the general public. In response to this scrutiny, a number of blue ribbon panels have been formed to examine how effectively higher education is serving American society. In this article, I analyse the…

Most European countries have introduced systematic quality assurance as part of an overall governance reform aimed at enhancing universities' autonomy. Researchers and economic entrepreneurs tend, however, to underestimate the political dimension of accreditation and evaluation when they consider the contribution of quality assurance to the…