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Focuses on Australian university publications. Choice of performance indicators; Incentive for placement in a prestigious journal.

Elizabeth A. Stuart is a Professor in the Departments of Mental Health, Biostatistics, and Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Associate Dean for Education at the school. She is a renowned expert in the area of causal inference, including propensity score methods for observational data and the generalizability of randomized trial results, and is also a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Prior to her appointment to the faculty at Johns Hopkins, Professor Stuart received her Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Smith College. In 2015, Professor Stuart was recognized at the International Conference on Health Policy Statistics with the Mid-Career Award from the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the Australian Federal Government attempted to de-regulate higher education fees so as to allow universities to set their own tuition fees. The associated public debate offer critical insights into how the identity of a student as a 'customer' of higher education is understood and deployed when developing higher education policy. This paper uses the 2014 Australian higher education reforms as a lens through which to further scholarly research into the student-as-customer metaphor and to see how it is influenced by the perceptions and understandings of policy actors external to the higher education sector. These include politicians, special interest groups, the students and their parents and prospective employers. This study reveals that the public/private nexus-both of funding and benefit-problematizes traditional conceptualisations of students and others as higher education customers. In turn, this restricts the ability or desire of policy actors to describe how the student functions as a customer as a consequence of market reform. This inability compromises the development of effective and sustainable higher education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changed funding arrangements and views of education have resulted in a re-prioritization of activities and practices in Australian universities. While considerable research attention has been given to the consequences of these changes for university policies and the activities of academic staff, less attention has been given to how students perceive these changes. In this paper, undergraduate students’ experience of the commodification of higher education sector are explored. The evidence suggests that the changed context is beginning to affect how students perceive university priorities and their effects on teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]