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This paper addresses the limited empirical analysis of higher education students' perceptions of contemporary labour market demands. It explores their perspectives on the health of the graduate labour market, what factors determine these and how their perceptions relate to self-perceived employability, career proactivity, career control and efforts to develop positional advantage. Further, the study examines determinants of students' career planning, all in the context of a challenging graduate labour market and higher education systems that have become more market-driven. The paper draws on evidence from a survey among Australian and UK students (N = 433), from two institutions and across a range of disciplines. Data revealed a number of significant findings. Overall, students who reported more positive perceptions of the current labour market were more likely to develop higher self-perceptions of employability, believe they had a greater sense of control over their career yet were less engaged with proactive career behaviours. Students perceived employability, their sense of career control and their reported career proactivity positively determined their engagement in career planning. The study enhances our understanding of the impact of labour market demand-side factors on student approaches to careers. It raises significant implications for universities and their career practitioners in identifying ways of enhancing students' career planning strategies within a more challenging labour market context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks the question: do people with different levels of research productivity and identification as a researcher think of research differently? It discusses a study that differentiated levels of research productivity among English and Australian academics working in research-intensive environments in three broad discipline areas: science, engineering and technology; social science and humanities; and medicine and health sciences. The paper explores the different conceptions of research held by these academics in terms of their levels of research productivity, their levels of research training, whether they considered themselves an active researcher and a member of a research team, and their disciplinary differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the assumption that increasing competition among higher education institutions is the best method of achieving a strong higher education sector in developing countries. It notes that there has been increasing emphasis on the importance of higher education institutions for sustainable development, particularly because of their importance to the global knowledge economy. For the same reason, the appropriate management of the relationship between the state and higher education institutions is vital to a strong and dynamic future for these institutions. This paper proposes a menu of options for higher education governance, grouped around ‘state-centric’ and ‘neo-liberal’ models of development. The ‘state-centric’ model proposed is based on a variety of examples of high performing Asian economies, in particular, while the ‘neo-liberal’ model is based on emerging trends in higher education management in countries such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. The paper suggests that despite pressure across the globe to encourage a market among universities, this may not always be the most efficient use of resources, or the best way to integrate universities in a country’s drive for economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the dynamics of competition in higher education. National competition and global competition are distinct, but feed into each other. Higher education produces ‘positional goods’ (Hirsch 1976) that provide access to social prestige and income-earning. Research universities aim to maximise their status as producers of positional goods. This status is a function of student selectivity plus research performance. At system-level competition bifurcates between exclusivist elite institutions that produce highly value positional goods, where demand always exceeds supply and expansion is constrained to maximise status; and mass institutions (profit and non-profit) characterised by place-filling and expansion. Intermediate universities are differentiated between these poles. In global competition, the networked open information environment has facilitated (1) the emergence of a world-wide positional market of elite US/UK universities; and (2) the rapid development of a commercial mass market led by UK and Australian universities. Global competition is vectored by research capacity. This is dominated by English language, especially US universities, contributing to the pattern of asymmetrical resources and one-way global flows. The paper uses Australia as its example of system segmentation and global/national interface. It closes by reflecting on a more balanced global distribution of capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider whether certain countries are particularly adept (or particularly poor) at getting children from disadvantaged homes to study for a bachelor's degree. A series of university access models are estimated for four English-speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and the USA), which include controls for comparable measures of academic achievement at age 15. Our results suggest that socioeconomic differences in university access are more pronounced in England and Canada than Australia and the USA and that cross-national variation in the socioeconomic gap remains even once we take account of differences in academic achievement. We discuss the implications of our findings for the creation of more socially mobile societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on earlier work by the author to explore the international dimensions of a study of the changing roles and identities of professional staff in higher education (Whitchurch , ). It further develops the concept of the blended professional, characterising individuals with identities drawn from both professional and academic domains, and examines the institutional spaces, knowledges, relationships and legitimacies that they construct. Comparisons between the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States are used to provide indicators of possible futures for this group of staff, including their positioning in the university community, the challenges they face, and the potentials that they offer to their institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journal, Higher Education (HE), was established in 1972 and is currently one of the leading international journals in higher education studies. By using bibliometric techniques, a systematic review, and a social network analysis, this review article provides an overview of the main patterns of publications in HE during its history. The findings show that (i) the volume of articles has been continuously increasing, with a particular marked uplift since 2007; (ii) while single-authored articles have dominated the publication pattern, collaborative articles have shown a particular growth over the last decade; (iii) the USA, the UK, and Australia have dominated the journal in terms of the number of articles, international collaboration, and the most prolific authors; (iv) while Chinese authors have become more evident, there has been a near-absence of contributions from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and most of Africa; (v) in the entire history of HE, there has been a gender imbalance (in favour of male authors) across the most cited articles, but this pattern has changed in the last decade and; (vi) both teaching and learning and system policy have been key research themes in the journal although internationalisation and the student experience have recently gained traction. These patterns of publication in HE, with their imbalances and absences, suggest several challenges ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global expansion of access to higher education has increased demand for information on academic quality and has led to the development of university ranking systems or league tables in many countries of the world. A recent UNESCO/CEPES conference on higher education indicators concluded that cross-national research on these ranking systems could make an important contribution to improving the international market for higher education. The comparison and analysis of national university ranking systems can help address a number of important policy questions. First, is there an emerging international consensus on the measurement of academic quality as reflected in these ranking systems? Second, what impact are the different ranking systems having on university and academic behavior in their respective countries? Finally, are there important public interests that are thus far not reflected in these rankings? If so, is there a needed and appropriate role for public policy in the development and distribution of university ranking systems and what might that role be? This paper explores these questions through a comparative analysis of university rankings in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although international students have been a notable research topic in higher education for more than 100 years, to date only one qualitative literature review has been published on the topic. In order to help researchers better understand the intellectual landscape of global research related to international students, we conducted a quantitative scientometric review of 3685 relevant journal articles published between 1900 and 2018 and indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection. The findings show that the number of articles published in the field has increased rapidly, especially since 2006, and this expansion has been led primarily by Australia, the U.K., and the USA, as these three countries not only produced most of the high-yielding research institutions and productive authors, but also published a majority of the prolific journals. Among the numerous topics discussed in these selected articles, cross-cultural adjustment, mental health problems, second-language acquisition, intercultural development, and student migration were most frequently studied, while social integration, graduate employability, and student satisfaction have emerged as new trends. These results complement the existing qualitative literature review from a quantitative perspective and provide valuable insights into and implications for global research related to international students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses benchmarking the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in teaching and learning between two universities with different missions: one an Australian campus-based metropolitan university and the other a British distance-education provider. It argues that the differences notwithstanding, it is possible to develop a useful and rigorous benchmarking relationship between such institutions that draws on previous benchmarking research and improves the approach by benchmarking key processes, not just outcomes. By defining a process used to embed ICT in subjects and using this as a focus of the benchmarking, a relational and prospective approach to quality assurance for ICT can be clarified, one which promotes coherence amongst the benchmarks that can be used for the purposes of improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]