This paper focuses on the effect of merger on university efficiency. In a first stage analysis, efficiency scores of English universities are derived for a 17-year period using the frontier estimation method data envelopment analysis. A second stage analysis explores the effect of merger and other factors on efficiency. We find that mean…

This paper draws on British Council commissioned research in response to concerns about women's absence from senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia. The study sought existing knowledge from literature, policies, and available statistics and collected original interview data from 30 academics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh,…

This article examines the development and growth of professional doctorates in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. It provides an overview of the development of the doctoral degree from its establishment at the universities of Paris and Bologna, and highlights the emergence of new forms of doctorates that have challenged the…

Within universities there is often still an implicit assumption that the doctorate is preparation for an academic career. Yet for over a decade there has been evidence in a number of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries that there are increasing numbers of students undertaking a doctorate and that larger…

Examined difficulties Finnish university students experienced in learning quantitative methods. Education and sociology students rated different topics on the basis of their difficulty. Overall, students considered statistics and quantitative methods more difficult than other domains. They tended to polarize academic subjects into…