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This article traces the development of four narratives of financial assistance for Australian university students - to encourage excellence; to meet public need; to build the stock of human capital; and as universal provision - and their effect on the development of a fifth narrative, centred on the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). Financial support schemes have been provided by governments, industry, philanthropic and religious groups, or a combination of these. These narratives reflect deep-seated ideas about the meaning and value of education, and the emphasis placed on public or private benefits. This article shows how these narratives have affected access to university and who has attended. It shows the influence of student support schemes in shaping higher education in Australia.

This study deployed a mixed-method approach to explore how international graduates identified and strategically utilised their resources to negotiate employability in the host country. One hundred and eighty international graduates from Australian universities participated in a survey and in-depth interviews. Findings revealed that employability was determined by various forms of capital including human, cultural social, identity and psychological. More importantly, the graduates had to develop 'agentic capital' to decide how to utilise these forms of capital appropriately. Social and cultural capitals emerged as the crucially important elements when the graduates looked for opportunities to get a foot into the labour market. These forms of capital enabled the graduates to mobilise their human capital. However, to navigate barriers in the workplace, the articulation of a sound understanding about the working culture became a 'must' because the graduates found it hard to understand hidden rules and conventions in the labour market. Results from the study indicate that graduate employability should not just be measured right after students' graduation because different forms of capital play their significant roles at different stages of the graduates' career development. Besides, higher education should equip students with various forms of capital.

This study explores perceived skill outcomes among graduates of 39 Australian higher education institutions in the short- to medium-term after course completion. While acknowledging important dimensions of graduate employability beyond the skills-based approach, we investigated graduate perspectives on their industry-relevant skill outcomes from university, in preparation for employment. Using national data, we build on earlier research by examining the viewpoints of 24,044 research and coursework graduates, at all levels, at six months and three years post-graduation. We found that as graduates progressed in their careers, perceived skill outcomes from university became less favourable, particularly among coursework graduates. Further, we observed differing perceptions among student groups, emphasising the potential learning gain for non-traditional student groups participating in skill-related interventions, such as work-integrated learning, and the need to design activities which cater to differing needs and are accessible by all. The study highlights how exploring graduate perspectives into the longer term can develop our understanding of the value of university education for enhancing skills and identifying potential areas for curriculum review.

Management educators have developed a wide variety of approaches to ensure students develop job-ready skills, resilience, and other forms of career capital to gain and retain employment in an ever-changing, competitive job market. Yet, concerns about the employability agenda's consequences for students' self-concept and wellbeing have gained urgency amid a crisis of confidence in capitalism. Humanistic approaches to management education map an alternative path, starting from students' unique values, voices, and experiences, and leading to the pursuit of a personal purpose. In this essay, we explore the tensions and potential synergies of the career capital and personal purpose approaches to career preparation and support. Building on our experiences at the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Business and Economics, we discuss how integrative learning experiences can combine these two approaches to (1) encourage students to recognize the mutual influence of career capital and personal purpose; and (2) provide rich opportunities for external stakeholder involvement to contribute to students' career capital and personal purpose development efforts. We believe that our proposals for embracing both career capital and personal purpose considerations can help management educators recalibrate their efforts to help students develop personally meaningful and sustainable careers.

This paper explores how students participating in a co-curricular scholarship programme in a large Australian university develop their employability. It seeks to add to recent literature regarding different approaches to graduate employability through examining how participating students' capital acquisition is shaped by and internalised within the structure and culture of the scholarship. The paper also offers an example of how comprehensive and integrated co-curricular scholarship programmes can facilitate graduate employability. It suggests that despite curricular intentions to promote comprehensive and processual approaches to employability, students' employability internalisations are influenced by possessive and positional messages and cultural cues within the scholarship programme. These insights serve as important considerations for higher education institutions seeking to instigate or improve their employability curricula.

There is a standardised neoliberal inspired notion of what professionalism entails for early childhood educators. These standards tend to infiltrate much of the literature, reporting and pre-service educator training, creating a notion that educators are never quite good enough at what they do. Although constant reflection and aiming for excellence are strongly held Western ideals, the effect on educator confidence and their ability to recognise their own strengths and achievements can be real. This discussion paper seeks to challenge the idea that good quality early childhood practice can always be identified and standardised, arguing the need for professional discretionary decision-making in order to adjust practice to context. Drawing on an example from an Australian service, where knowledge, care, partnership and support for potentially vulnerable families to support their children was highly valued by parents, it illustrates that such qualities can go unrecognised by the staff themselves. What we risk losing when we prescribe what quality entails will be of interest to educational leaders, researchers and those who teach pre-service educators.

This article revisits the Mincer earnings function and presents comparable estimates of the average monetary returns associated with an additional year of education across different regions worldwide. In contrast to the traditional Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method commonly employed in the literature, this study applied a cutting-edge approach known as Support Vector Regression (SVR), which belongs to the family of machine learning (ML) algorithms. SVR is specifically chosen to address the bias arising from underfitting inherent in OLS. The analysis focuses on recent data spanning from 2010 to 2018, ensuring temporal homogeneity across the examined regions. The findings reveal that each additional year of education, on average, yields a private rate of returns of 10.4%. Notably, Sub-Saharan Africa exhibits the highest returns to education at 17.8%, while Europe demonstrates the lowest returns at 7.2%. Moreover, higher education is associated with the highest returns across the regions, with a rate of 12%, whereas primary education yields returns of 10%. Interestingly, women generally experience higher returns than men, with rates of 10.6 and 10.1%, respectively. Over time, the returns to education exhibit a modest decline, decreasing at a rate of approximately 0.1% per year, while the average duration of education demonstrates an increase of 0.16 years per year (1% per year). The application of the state-of-the-art ML technique, SVR, not only improves the accuracy of estimates but also enhances predictive performance measures such as the coefficient of determination (R[superscript 2]) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) when compared to the OLS method. The implications drawn from these findings emphasize the need for expanding university education, as well as investments in primary education, along with significant attention toward promoting girls' education. These findings hold considerable importance for policymakers who are tasked with making informed decisions regarding education expenditure and the implementation of education financing programs.

Purpose: This paper explores the economic and social effects of human capital investment in the 20th century. As well as drawing on census data and statistical yearbooks in Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the paper develops its argument by an intersection of scholarly work in sociology, economics and the history of education to consider the effects of increased human capital investment on economic growth but also on the experiences of childhood, work discipline and the present climate crisis. Design/methodology/approach: This paper considers the implications of what economic historian Claudia Goldin has described as the "human capital century" for the history of school and university education. By reconsidering education in the settler colonies, especially Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, as "stimulus", this helps explain key aspects of contemporary human capital investment, which the paper argues should be understood as constituted by children's and young people's free labour at school, university and across the economy. Findings: This research argues that children's and young people's free labour, performed in educational institutions, constitutes a large portion of Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand's national investment in human capital. At key points, this investment has acted as an economic stimulus, promoting surges of profitability. The effects were not confined to young people. Systematised, educational expansion also became the foundation of environmental degradation, labour market exploitation and a relentless increase in service-sector productivity that is worn on professional bodies. Productivity increases have been associated with reduced professional autonomy as a managerial class coerced professionals into working harder, though often under the guise of working "smarter" -- a fiction that encouraged or coerced even greater personal investment in collective human capital. This investment of personal time, effort and selfhood by children and the professionals they grew into can thus be seen, in Marxian terms, as a crucial vector of capitalist exploitation in the 20th century. Practical implications: The paper concludes by suggesting that a reduction of managerial influence in educational settings would improve learner and professional autonomy with improved labour and environmental conditions. Originality/value: The paper makes a unique contribution to the history of education by exploring education as stimulus as a key component of education's role in 20th and 21st century capitalism. It interrogates exploitative aspects of human capital investment, especially in the midst of environmental catastrophe and the recent COVID crisis.

Employability is a powerful discourse in higher education, yet as a driver for policy and practice it has not translated into an uplift in graduate outcomes for all student groups. In particular, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Migrant and/or Refugee (CALDMR) students experience inequitable graduate outcomes and access to meaningful employment opportunities. Drawing on a national study of career advisors and CALDMR students' experiences of how Australian universities support their career development, we examine CALDMR students' employability through the conceptual framework of graduate capitals. We make two key contributions: firstly, we offer insights into staff and student perceptions of university approaches with CALDMR. Secondly, we identify a lack of linguistic and cultural diversity conceptualisations of employability by examining the experiences of CALDMR students and staff through the lens of graduate capitals. We disrupt the assumptions and presumed familiarity with cultural knowledge.

International higher education in many developed countries and more particularly in the United States and Australia has become a great source of revenue for their economies from students of the developing and underdeveloped countries (Least Development Countries). Money together with the mobility of international students from Least Development Countries to the developed world have created social inequality with no sustainable method for successful and sustainable internationalisation policies and agendas. This situation of inequality is created by a viciously interdependent circle formed by the erosion of monetary, human and linguistic capital. Calamities beyond human control including COVID-19 amplify social inequality due to the aforementioned erosion of capital. This article compares the international higher education scenes in the USA and Australia which have strong educational collaborations with a developing country like India. The piece uses extant literature in partnership with the technique of discourse analysis to provide a critical analysis of the politics of the existing internationalisation policies in international higher education and provides suggestions to deliver better internationalisation policies.

Do employers prioritize university prestige above an applicant's skills in the hiring process? To distinguish between the effect of human capital in the hiring process from the effect of the name of the graduating university--while controlling for networking effects--2,400 fictitious applications were submitted to IT and accounting jobs in the US, UK, and Australia. The resumes belonged to fictitious citizens, both female and male. For each sector of the labor market, two resumes were designed. One resume had a high skills match with the generic requirements of entry level jobs in each sector. A second resume had a low skills match with the same requirements. For each country, one high-ranked university and one non-high-ranked university were selected to signal prestige. The name of the graduating university and the sex of the applicant were randomly assigned on otherwise identical resumes. High skills match applications were 79 percent more likely to receive a callback than low skills match applications. University prestige and sex were not statistically significant predictors of callbacks. These findings suggest that human capital, and not university prestige, predicts callback outcomes in skill intensive sectors of the labor market for entry-level applicants with a bachelor's degree.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate graduate employer perceptions of determining factors in recruitment decisions and their preferred use of recruitment channels. This study drew on the employability capitals model to interpret findings and identify ways to better prepare higher education students for recruitment and selection. This is particularly important in declining graduate labour markets, further weakened by COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach: This study gathered data from surveying 183 Australian employers from different organisational settings. Responses were analysed using descriptive and multivariate techniques, the latter exploring variations by role type, sector and organisation size. Findings: Findings reaffirmed the criticality of students having the right disposition and demonstrating professional capabilities during recruitment, highlighting the value of building cultural and human capital during university years. Recruitment channels that require students to mobilise their identity and social capital were prioritised, particularly among private sector organisations. Work-based internships/placements were considered important for identifying graduate talent and developing strong industry-educator partnerships, needed for building networks between students and employers. Originality/value: This study provides valuable insights into determinants of graduate recruitment decision-making from the employer perspective. These highlight to students the important role of capitals, and how they can be developed to optimise recruitment success. This study presents practical strategies for universities to build their students' human, social, cultural and identity capital. Findings on the prioritisation of recruitment channels among graduate employers from different sectors will enable students and universities to better prepare for future recruitment. It emphasises that student engagement with employability-related activities is a critical resource for an effective transition to the workplace.

Outbound student mobility can be regarded as an important foreign policy initiative to exert and increase national influence in host locations. But how to evaluate the specific soft power influences remains unsolved. In this article, an educational soft power framework that can provide a reference in evaluating soft power of related education activities in future empirical studies is proposed. Taking the Australian short-term student mobility program, New Colombo Plan, as an example, the soft power pursuit of outbound student mobility is analyzed. Evaluating its detailed soft power elements and influences is conducted by examining its evaluation reports under the framework. The study then provides some suggestions for future implementation and study for promoting soft power.

Purpose: This paper aims to draw on an in-depth qualitative case study of an undergraduate sustainability education course to show the extent of pedagogical reflection and teaching capability demonstrated in lived practice to support transformative, systemic and capability building learning processes, as advocated in the literature, for effective sustainability education. Design/methodology/approach: Transformative learning and capability building are an essential part of sustainability education according to the growing body of literature. This approach to education, however, necessitates critical, learner-centred pedagogies which challenge traditional transmissive modes of teaching. Findings: This paper finds that pedagogy which supports the learning experiences and outcomes advocated in sustainability education literature requires significant reflection on behalf of the educator and also motivation, capability and experience to do this, thus more research and academic support is needed which focusses on pedagogical development within sustainability education. Originality/value: Literature on sustainability education often assumes that teachers are capable of reflecting on and transforming their pedagogical practice, and therefore, the pedagogical implications of sustainability education are often understated in research findings. This paper highlights why pedagogical reflection plays a crucial role in the effective implementation of sustainability education.

Purpose: This paper aims to understand the development track of skills mismatch research and discover the hidden internal connections between literature. Design/methodology/approach: The authors gathered data through scientometric quantitative analysis using CiteSpace. Specifically, this article applied basic analysis, journal cocitation analysis (JCA), author cocitation analysis (ACA) and document cocitation analysis (DCA), cluster analysis, citation burstness detection, scientific research cooperation analysis and coconcurrence analysis of keywords of 3,125 documents from Web of Science core collections for the period 2000-2020. Findings: Through the document cocitation analysis and the keywords' co-occurrence, this article identifies influential scholars, documents, research institutions, journals and research hotspots in research on the skills mismatch phenomenon. The results showed that the publications had ballooned, and the phenomenon has become an interdisciplinary research subject. The USA and Finland remain the main contributors, which is attributed to their high-yield institutions such as the University of Helsinki, the University of Witwatersrand, the University of Washington and so on. While the African continent lacks research on skills mismatch even with the continent's effort to overcome such a crucial issue. The paper presents an in-depth analysis of skills and educational mismatch issues to better understand the evolutionary trajectory of the collective knowledge over the past 20 years and highlight the areas of active pursuit. Research limitations/implications: The authors only used Web of Science core collection to collect data; however, they can added Scopus indexed database as well to extend the research trends and explore more new research hot topics to solve the skills mismatch phenomenon. Originality/value: The scientometric analysis is of great significance for identifying the potential relationship between the literature and investigating the knowledge evolution of skills mismatch research. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Labor Organization and the World Health Organization are the giants who are mostly concerned of the mismatch skills phenomenon. Researchers can refer to this study to understand the status quo, gaps and research trends to deal with the skills mismatch issue.

International graduate employability is critical to host universities' positioning in the education export market, internationalisation agenda and ethical responsibility to international students and alumni. However, little is known about the positioning and re-positioning of international graduates in their home labour market. This article responds to this critical gap in the literature by drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 Vietnamese graduates from Australian universities who have returned to their home country since 2015. The qualitative data were interpreted through the innovative conceptual framework combining Bourdieu's forms of capital and Harré's positioning theory. The study found the emergence of three distinctive positionings of Vietnamese returning graduates: the "explorer," the "advancer" and the "adventurer." Based on the empirical findings, the study contributes to the literature on graduate employability by showing that labour market navigation is an ongoing interaction between initial capitals and continued accumulation of capitals, which play a critical role in determining returnees' positioning and repositioning in the market. The findings of the study provide important implications for returning graduates as well as host universities and home employers to provide effective support for this cohort to enhance their employability and facilitate their access to the home labour market.

An important component of PhD students' educational experiences is the understanding they develop of their academic identity. In this study, we explore PhD students' expectations and lived realities during their studies through the lens of Bourdieu's theory of practice. We show that doctoral students perceive the PhD as an all-consuming endeavor and, at the same time, a degree of competing demands. Importantly, several doctoral students' academic identities were laden with conceptions of marginalization, which evoked feelings of disempowerment and lead to a lack of agency. Therefore, this study advocates for a doctoral environment where different forms of human capital are valued and the voices of PhD students are respected within the academy. This will ensure that future scholars are able to enter the academy with a strong sense of who they are and where they fit within their field.

Access to educational opportunities is instrumental for social integration of refugee youth. This paper reports on a qualitative case study of educational aspirations and experiences of refugee-background African youth (RAY) in Melbourne, Australia. Guided by a capability approach to social justice, in-depth interviews were conducted with two groups of RAY: those who have transitioned to higher education (HE), and those who have not transitioned to HE after completing high school. The findings show that: (a) RAY share a firm belief in the value of HE; (b) but they are differently positioned to convert opportunities into achievements -- e.g. only the refugee youth with high levels of navigational capacity take advantage of the available flexible pathways to HE; (c) the stress of racism pervades the educational experiences of both groups; and (d) some African refugee youth have shown a considerable level of resilience in that, despite the challenges of racism, a history of disrupted educational trajectories and a lack of scholarly resources at home, they have transitioned to and thrived in HE. In light of these findings, the paper draws some implications for equity policies and practices.

This article investigates how international educational experiences affect the employment opportunities of Chinese who graduated from an Australian university. Findings based on 26 semi-structured interviews highlight that Chinese students who graduated from Australia gained a web of capital (i.e., human, cultural, psychological and identity), which facilitated their employment upon return home. However, social capital, which is critical in China, was a weakness for Chinese students who graduated from overseas institutions. The findings have provided strong evidence that Chinese students' employability benefited from studying overseas. This research utilised the Tomlinson's Graduate Capital Model to an international education context. It has implications for Chinese students on how they could benefit from studying overseas and for universities that recruit Chinese international students.

Introduction: This study examines how Australian academic librarians perceive techniques for promoting services and resources, and the factors affecting the perceptions regarding effectiveness of techniques used. Method: Data were collected from an online survey that was sent to 400 academic librarians in thirty-seven Australian universities. The response rate was 57.5%. Analysis: The qualitative data were analysed using content analysis. The collected quantitative and qualitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics (ordinal regressions). Results: Librarians used a variety of techniques to promote services and resources. Demographic variables, human capital variables and library variables were significant predictors of perceptions of the effective promotion techniques used. However, this study indicates that other independent variables such as number of different library professional positions and years involved in all library services made no difference. Conclusions: This study provides a better understanding of academic librarians' attitudes and views towards techniques for promoting services and resources. Librarians may use the results to reflect on the effectiveness of these techniques, to balance the weight of the factors' influences and to better understand various promotion techniques. This will enable them to promote library services and resources more effectively in the future.

Purpose: This research moves beyond a focus on employability skills and explores student perceptions of preparedness for graduate life in a more holistic manner. Design/methodology/approach: Final-year business students were asked to outline their concerns regarding graduate life and the personal and professional challenges anticipated in their careers. The results are presented in the context of graduate capitals, which is a broader view than the more traditional skills-based approach. Findings: The results indicate students do not feel underprepared for the workplace in terms of human capital, social capital, cultural capital and identity capital. However, many students feel inadequately prepared in terms of psychological capital and their ability to deal with the expected challenges of the workplace such as stress, long hours and the demands of a professional environment. Research limitations/implications: This study extends our knowledge of student preparation for the workplace and suggests research opportunities to better understand psychological capital development in graduates. Practical implications: Greater confidence and a perception of preparedness may be increased for graduates if opportunities for psychological capital development and increased promotion of its importance are enhanced. Social implications: The results encourage a more holistic approach to employability in graduates and have relevance for all stakeholders concerned with graduate outcomes and workplace transition. Originality/value: The paper presents work-readiness in the context of graduate capitals, which is broader than the traditional skills-based approach. It also focuses on student perceptions of their level of preparation for the workplace. This has enabled results which highlight psychological capital development as a key area in which students feel underprepared

Neoliberalism is often understood as being both an epoch of capitalism and a zealous ideological commitment to the primacy of private property and free markets. In practice, it has tended towards mobilising state power in the interests of capital, remaking societies and individuals in this process. Perhaps inevitably, education systems, the world over, have been reformed in light of neoliberalism's overarching imperatives. It is in this light that we can best understand and make sense of recent reforms to Queensland's senior secondary schooling system. While some details continue to be ironed out, the reformed system will revolve around three main planks: (a) an assessment model combining school-based and common external assessment, (b) a process that quantifies and standardises school-based assessment through external review processes and (c) a transition away from the Overall Position (OP) rank towards an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR). These changes to assessment and tertiary admission represent a pivot away from Queensland's historical commitments to school-based assessment and teacher and curriculum flexibility towards a standardised national system of curriculum and external assessment. Ultimately, the reforms embody the ideological commitments of neoliberalism, perpetuating schools as producers of human capital. Hence, Queensland's senior secondary schooling reforms ought to be understood through two different frames: firstly, as embodying the dominant ideological imperatives of neoliberalism and, secondly, that education is, within this context, being reconstituted to meet the perceived needs of capital.

This study deployed a qualitative approach to explore an alternative perspective regarding graduate migrants' employability. Twenty graduate migrants in Australia participated in in-depth interviews. Findings revealed graduate migrants faced various challenges in the target labour market, and to successfully secure employment it was important for them to develop key forms of capital -- i.e., excellent technical knowledge, relationships with 'significant others', strong career identity and psychological resilience, and exercise agency in interlinking these capitals so that they could make use of their strengths and coat weaknesses. Results from the study imply that managing, teaching, and professional staff members should collaborate closely to develop well-rounded programmes to sufficiently equip international students with multidimensional resources.

'Student success' is a key driver in higher education policy and funding. Institutions often adopt a particular lens of success, emphasising 'retention and completion', 'high grades', 'employability after graduation' discourses, which place high value on human capital or fiscal outcomes. We explored how students themselves articulated notions of success to understand how these meanings aligned with the implicit value system perpetuated by neoliberal higher education systems. Qualitative data collected from 240 survey responses in the first phase of a study, were analysed using "Appraisal," a linguistic framework to systematically categorise evaluative language choices. This article focuses on questions eliciting students' articulations of success. Neoliberal discourses were challenged by these students, who were first-in-family at university, with success expressed in a personal and generational sense rather than solely meritocratic terms.

The Commonwealth government provides fee exemption for any Australian who undertakes a PhD. This policy is presumably based on the "clever country" assumption that an educated population will develop and contribute to social and economic capital. Enrolment numbers therefore continue to increase, and a PhD is no longer an elite qualification. In addition, the characteristics and demographics of PhD students are changing. In the School of Education, University of South Australia, a significant number of PhD students are not early career researchers or recent honours graduates, but mid-to-late-career education practitioners and retirees, and the majority are women. These mature-age and third-age candidates are undertaking doctoral research not to launch their career, but in most cases to reflect on it, with many experiencing transformative learning in the process. In this paper I will explore why people undertake a PhD later in life, what the learning process is like for them, what the outcomes are, and the benefits to society. (Contains 1 figure.)

While Australian evidence suggests that the Private Rate of Return (PRR) to a university degree in Australia has gradually declined with increases in the cost of higher education, these studies have only measured the PRR for the average male and average female. This paper uses income data from the ABS Income and Housing Survey (2003-04) CURF to measure the impact of the 2005 increase in HECS fees on the PRR based on gender and marital status. This paper shows that the return to a university degree is largely affected by both gender and marital status and studies that measure the PRR to a university degree for single males and single females with no dependent children underestimate the PRR for most male graduates and overestimate the PRR of female graduates.

In a context of intensified globalisation, knowledge diaspora as "trans-national human capital" have become increasingly valuable to society. With an awareness of a need for more empirical studies especially in Australia, this article concentrates on a group of academics who were working at a major university in Australia and came originally from the Chinese mainland. The study explores their life, work and international research collaborations, using a case study approach with semi-structured interviews as the data collection method. The study found that while globalisation shapes the work and the contributions to Australia, by academics from China, they exert their initiatives to respond to and further reshape globalisation. Equipped with their Chinese cultural and educational backgrounds, academic experience in the West, and active membership in the international knowledge system, the Chinese knowledge diaspora are a modern kind of cosmopolitan literati. They are aware of the impact of globalisation and contribute actively to higher education internationalisation in both Australia and China, have maintained their cultural identity and made good use of their Chinese educational background. Their international collaborations, however, are more likely to be with the scholars from Western countries due to some difficulties they have experienced in China and Australia, and to the current setup of the global knowledge system.

The results reveal that tertiary institutions have low levels of EEO reporting especially for sexual orientation and religious issues. More mandatory state-based legislation may be needed.

In a period of student loan scandals and U.S. financial market instability impacting on the cost and availability of student loans, this paper looks at alternative models of higher education funding. In this context, it also considers the level of financial support that the government should provide to higher education.

Study at a foreign university can be an important way of developing international human capital. We investigate factors affecting international student flows for higher education and their consequences for bilateral market integration in Australia. Estimation results demonstrate that income, cost competitiveness, migration network effects and other education pathways increase the demand for tertiary education. Our results show that university study, inter alia, is an important determinant of bilateral trade between Australia and the student's home country.

This article presents comparative empirical data from England, the US and Australia on academic boards (also known as faculty senates or academic senates) to highlight ways in which changes within contemporary academic governance effect a diminution of academic voice within decision-making about and that affects teaching and research. Drawing on Bourdieu's notions of academic and intellectual capital, it highlights the limited capacity of analyses of university power relations that are predicated upon managerial and collegial governance as being at opposite ends of a spectrum to account for the multiple academics who have taken up line management or executive-level roles, and the many practising academics who undertake quite substantial administrative roles alongside their teaching and research. The article concludes by arguing that a more nuanced reading of Bourdieu's academic and intellectual capital, combined with his concept of the divided habitus, offers significant potential for a deeper understanding of the complex ways in which the asymmetries of power within universities are developed and maintained. In turn, this opens the way to transformational academic governance practices that could reassert academic voice within decision-making about academic matters.

Graduate employability has become a key driver for universities in Australia and the UK. In response to increasing pressure from governments and employer groups, universities have adopted a range of generic skill-based learning outcomes which, when embedded into degree programs, are expected to increase graduate employability and therefore improve graduate employment outcomes. In addition, many universities are now including internships, work placements and international study in their programmes with the aim of enhancing graduate employment prospects. This somewhat instrumental approach to graduate employability does not, however, take into account other critical factors. Drawing on the broader employability literature, this article develops a framework that incorporates six key dimensions -- human capital, social capital, individual attributes, individual behaviours, perceived employability and labour market factors -- to help explore and explain the concept of graduate employability.

There has been an increasing interest within the academic literature on the role played by Higher Education Institutions in the social and economic development of their communities. The Australia Government has recently released its National Science and Innovation Agenda (NISA) which is designed to incentivise university-community research partnerships. In this article, the identified lack of Australian university-community engagement will be problematised through the experience of academics who undertook such an engagement in a regional university setting. A completed research project is used as a lens through which institutional factors impacting on collaborative projects between universities and their communities are identified. The difficulties of university-community engagement are unpacked and problematised so that the various forces contributing to the shortage of university-community partnerships can be better identified and understood. The unitary manner in which university-community research is to be reported under NISA is highlighted as a key barrier to regional research partnerships.

This article examines the long-run effect of higher education, measured in average years of tertiary schooling, on the level and growth rate of national per capita income. It uses an improved dataset on educational attainments which not only reduces measurement error but also overcomes data comparability issues and allows us to estimate the long-run effect of human capital through higher education on economic development. Using unique long panel data for 36 advanced and emerging economies spanning over the period 1870-2010, we find that higher education has a positive and significant effect on the level and the growth rate of national per capita income. Specifically, our empirical results indicate that a 1% increase in educational attainment at higher education level would raise the growth rate of per capita income by about 0.01% to 0.02% over a five-year period. That is, at the sample mean, an increase in average tertiary education by one year would raise output growth by about 6% to 11% in five years. We find that the returns to female education are lower than the returns to male education at tertiary schooling levels. Our results are robust to alternative specifications.

This discussion considers a new pre-service teacher education initiative at the University of Western Sydney, called "Classmates". "Classmates" aims to prepare pre-service teachers to work in diverse and challenging schools. The paper argues that the neo-liberal industrial model of mass teacher education may be limited in its capacity to adequately prepare pre-service teachers for the difficulties they may encounter in a society where sociocultural inequality is growing. It points out that pre-service teacher-education needs to build "teacher capital" to better prepare graduates and to buffer the transition from tertiary student to beginning teacher. "Classmates" offers one way that this may be achieved. Findings from the "Classmates" research clearly point to the pre-service teachers' acquisition of several forms of teacher capital, identified as (i) knowledge about students; (ii) knowledge about teaching and the institution; and (iii) knowledge about professional networks. The continuous "Classmates" practicum was perceived to make a major contribution to the development of this capital.

Part-time postgraduate students make up a significant proportion of the student population, yet their experience remains poorly understood. In this article, a multi-phase, explanatory mixed-method study conducted within Tasmanian health and human services provides some answers. Students reported improved job performance, self-esteem and increased motivation to learn as primary outcomes. Other benefits of significance included an increased ability to manage change and increased job satisfaction. At the other end of the scale, fewer than half of all respondents agreed that part-time postgraduate study led to increased pay or remuneration, and only one-quarter of respondents believed their study led to improvements in personal relationships. There were significant associations between organisational placement and perceptions of benefit. The managers of those who were studying were less likely to perceive either increased job satisfaction or improved job performance in their subordinates. Amongst postgraduate, mature-age, part-time student respondents, their prior experience in higher education, professional background, seniority in the organisation, age and gender were also associated with differing perceptions of the benefits of higher education. These results add to the body of knowledge around the human, social and identity capital benefits associated with lifelong learning, and this study provides guidance for students, employers and universities.

Australia attracts international nursing students from China to maintain its economic advantage and to alleviate the projected nursing shortage; conversely, China needs its best and brightest citizens who have trained abroad in nursing to return to cope with current challenges within its healthcare system and nursing education. This paper explores whether China can lure its foreign-trained nurses home to achieve its goals; whether China or Australia will win the nursing talent war; and do Chinese nursing students want to remain abroad or return home. The insight gained can support the development of successful human capital investment for all parties involved.

In the past few decades, especially since the 2008-09 economic downturn, the faculty of American colleges and universities has undergone a far-reaching transformation. Multiple factors, mainly extraneous to the campus itself, are reshaping higher education, and as a result a reprioritizing of the internal allocation of resources is occurring. The faculty--as a corporate body--is increasingly bearing the brunt of these adjustments. The authors have explored the precise contours of that transformation--and the risks it poses for our higher education enterprise--in their new book, "The Faculty Factor" (Finkelstein., Conley, & Schuster, 2016a). The authors believe that the faculty remains at the indispensable center of what higher education seeks to do. At the same time, there needs to be a reassessment of what has become of the faculty. This article describes the series of powerful changes that have occurred--and are still occurring--that are reshaping the faculty and its role at this volatile time.

Since the late 1970s, international education has steadily gained in popularity in China. An emerging middle class seeks to strengthen its position in China's rapidly stratifying society under its socialist market economy with the shift from wealth creation for all to wealth concentration for a few. Previously, a foreign qualification was considered a passport to success in either the host or home country's labour market. But the growing popularity of overseas study, coupled with the massification of the Chinese higher education, means Chinese international students are seeking to distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive global labour market. This longitudinal study of international graduates, backgrounded by Australian employer perceptions, examines the journeys of 13 Chinese accounting graduates as they attempt to transition from an Australian university into the Australian labour market. Bourdieu's thinking tools of field, capital, disposition and habitus are utilised to consider how different cultural, social and linguistic capitals inform employer understandings of "employability" meant Chinese accounting graduates significantly adjusted their life goals.

This paper explores the proposition that modern universities have been changed radically by globalization not least of which has been the erosion of "public scholarship". The paper argues that whatever the kind or scale of changes which have occurred in the past few decades, "globalization" does not provide an explanation of what has happened. Rather far-reaching changes have been made driven by human capital theory and the practices of the New Public Management. Have these changes spelled the end of public scholarship? The paper proposes that in Australia at least public scholarship played little if any part in the actual work practices or culture of Australian academics in the recent past. Whatever the apparent value of the idea of the university as "critic and conscience and critic of society", the absence of any sustained intellectual or practical resistance to changes introduced into modern Australian universities (like "student-centred learning") since the 1990s points to a significant and long-term absence of a vibrant culture of public scholarship.

This article examines the increased interest being shown by Australian business faculties in the development of students' employability skills. Many universities have demonstrated their commitment to translating such interest into practice by elaborating lists of "graduate attributes" in order to enable the development of generic skills and by encouraging their staff to adopt specific pedagogical tools for such ends. This approach is underpinned by the assumption that the acquisition and transferability of such skills can enhance students' human capital and, therefore, their employability. The aim in this article is to identify the limitations of this perspective and to present a conceptual framework that overcomes them. To this end, the article draws on various concepts elaborated by Bourdieu as a means to encompass the multiple stakeholders involved in the field of tertiary education and to investigate the adoption of teaching methodologies designed to enable the development of generic skills.

This paper empirically examines the impact of academic research on high-tech manufacturing growth of 28 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and emerging countries over the 1991-2005 period. A standard research and development (R&D) expenditure based measure is found to be too general to capture the input in high-tech research. To overcome this problem, a novel proxy for high-tech research investment--the supercomputer capacity--is proposed. Empirical evidence strongly supports this choice of variable. It is also found that academic R&D exerts a larger growth effect on high-tech output than its industry and government counterparts, but only the impact differential between academic and government R&D is statistically significant.

Data show that educated workers earn higher wages and are unemployed less often. Some researchers believe that education improves a worker's productivity (or "human capital"), making them more desirable on the job market, while others believe that it improves a worker's network (or "social capital"), giving them more information about lucrative openings and more resources to secure a job (such as references from peers). Much of the research on human and social capital focuses on quantifying the various impacts of schooling on workers and often overlooks how economic systems actually manage to produce those outcomes. This paper develops an agent-based complex adaptive system featuring formal schooling and on-the-job training, social networks, labour market search and durable employment contracts to explain the process linking education to labour market outcomes and economic performance in New Zealand (and similar economies). Sample simulations show that human capital accumulation explains many of the novel facts seen in the data, while social capital alone is not enough.

There is widespread support for expanding access to universities for under-represented groups, such as students from lower socio-economic backgrounds and older students, because of the higher rates of return to university degrees. This study examines whether this assumption holds true for mature-aged graduates who have received their degrees in an era of mass participation. Using data from Australia, where around a quarter of university students are now over 25 years of age, the returns to higher education of mature-aged and younger graduates between 2001 and 2009 were compared. It was found that mature-aged graduates are more likely to reside in less-advantaged areas and to be the first person in their family to attend university but are less likely to be employed in the year before graduation, compared to younger graduates. However, in the year after graduation, employment status and earnings do not differ significantly for graduates regardless of their age at graduation.

This study investigates the incidence of over-education amongst recent Australian bachelor degree graduates and its effect on their earnings. We find that between 24% and 37% of graduates were over-educated shortly after course completion, with over-education most common amongst young females and least common amongst older females. Over-education rates vary markedly across major fields of study and appear to be associated with the relative demand for graduate labour. Overeducation was less common three years after course completion; however a nontrivial proportion of graduates remain over-educated. With regard to the effect of over-education on earnings, we find a notable age-related effect not reported in earlier studies. Young over-educated graduates were not penalised after unobserved heterogeneity had been addressed, whereas older over-educated graduates were at an earnings disadvantage relative to their well-matched peers. (Contains 6 tables.)

In modern society, individuals are having to assume increasing responsibility for their own career trajectories. One of the key ways in which individuals can engage in such "career self-management" is by taking up learning opportunities through further study. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to explore, using the conceptual framework of career capital, ways in which samples of adults in Australia and Singapore perceive that they are self-managing and leveraging their careers through continuing education, and the nature of the career capital they are accumulating. It draws on data from two different research projects undertaken in Australia and Singapore. These projects involved individuals who had undertaken studies in two different educational sectors: the academic and the vocational. Australian respondents ("n" = 190) had studied in both the vocational education and training (VET) and the higher education (HE) sectors; Singaporean respondents ("n" = 101) had graduated from both the formal tertiary education (PET) and the Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ) sectors. Data were gathered through online surveys and in-depth interviews. Based on the reports from these samples, the study found that the building of career capital was being played out relatively consistently despite educational, political and cultural differences, but that different emphases were placed on the types of career capital, with 'knowing-how' the most important.

Drawing on the findings from in-depth interviews with Vietnamese international students studying at Australian universities, this article presents insights into the sociological influences that stem from international students' social networks, at home and abroad, and how they impact on students' aspirations and engagement in international education. Underpinned by Bourdieu's social capital framework, this article critically challenges human capital ideology for its assumptions of individualism and utilitarian function of education as economic goals. The implication for international education providers is to create learning and living opportunities that consider students' social and cultural conditions so as to develop their capacity, self-determination and citizenship.

Aspiration for higher education (HE) is no longer a matter solely for students and their families. With OECD nations seeking to position themselves more competitively in the global knowledge economy, the need for more knowledge workers has led to plans to expand their HE systems to near universal levels. In Australia, this has required the government and institutions to enlist students who traditionally have not seen university as contributing to their imagined and desired futures. However, this paper suggests that failing to appreciate the aspirations of different groups, understood as a collective cultural capacity, casts doubt over the ability of institutions to deliver increased numbers of knowledge workers. Moreover, inciting subscription to the current norms of HE is a weak form of social inclusion. Stronger forms of equity strategy are possible when HE is repositioned as a resource for different groups and communities to access in the pursuit of their aspirations.

A nation's culture, competitiveness and economic performance explain academic performance. Partial Least Squares (PLS) testing of 2252 students shows culture affects competitiveness and academic performance. Culture and economic performance each explain 32%; competitiveness 36%. The model predicts academic performance when culture, competitiveness and economic performance vary. A three-tier market categorisation enhances academic performance. (Contains 5 tables, 1 figure and 3 notes.)

Recent educational attainment targets set by Australian governments recognise education and training as pivotal to the economic and social well-being of Australians. The targets seek to close the gaps in attainment that socially and economically divide the population, and, in doing so, raise the levels of skills of the workforce and improve the ways in which education and training are delivered. TVET will play a critical role as it provides important programs for raising Year 12 completion rates, for re-engaging early school leavers, and for helping adults acquire qualifications after many years away from formal study. This paper examines some of the prospects and challenges that confront the TVET system in engaging with new populations and helping promote lifelong education for the most disadvantaged: early school leavers, the indigenous, people from poor families, those located in rural and remote areas and those with disabilities. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)