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Doctorate level attainment has increased significantly in developed economies. In 2019, the average share of 25–64-year-olds with a doctorate across the OECD was around 1%. However, if current trends continue, 2.3% of today's young adults will enter doctoral studies at some point in their life. This essay starts by describing the expansion of doctoral education. It then reflects on the causes of this growth and the consequences for the nature and purpose of the doctorate. This reflection is mostly based on published research in Higher Education in the last 50 years and the author's work on policy analysis for the OECD on this topic. The paper finishes with a research agenda on doctoral education and the career of doctorate holders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programmes to encourage the return of migrants living with irregular status are prominent in many OECD countries. Bearing titles like ‘assisted voluntary return and reintegration’ (AVRR), they are often rationalized as a more humane alternative to forced deportation. Critics question their voluntariness, suggesting they are actually an extension of the deportation apparatus. While broadly sympathetic to these criticisms, this paper offers a novel perspective on AVRR. We argue AVRR is reshaping what we call the political imaginary of deportation. Focusing on the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a leading architect of AVRR, we insist scholars take seriously the visual images and narratives through which voluntary return is discursively constructed. First, we discuss the political imaginary, and clarify what this concept brings to deportation studies. Second, we present a mapping of the political imaginary of deportation as this appears within IOM information campaigns concerning AVRR. We organize this material in terms of three analytics: returnees as activists, return journeys as homecoming, and deportation as self-reinvention. In the eyes of many activists and migrants, deportation has very negative and painful connotations. We show that IOM reimagines the landscape of deportation in a positive light. We call this move the deportation twist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Increasing female educational attainment across OECD countries is making hypogamy a widespread phenomenon. This trend provides an opportunity to re-examine the effects of educational assortative mating on children's educational outcomes. This research explores the effects of hypergamy, homogamy, and hypogamy on gender differences in children's expectation of university graduation and actual college graduation. For the first purpose, logistic regression with country fixed-effects is applied to individual-level data from PISA 2015; a similar analysis is carried out for the second purpose with data from the European Social Survey. Three characteristics make us expect higher female advantage among children of hypogamous couples: higher probability of mothers being the main family breadwinner; higher probability of gender value conflict, eventually leading to family breakup and the father's absence; and the possibility that the father's occupation discourages sons from pursuing higher education. A systematic female advantage is indeed found among children of hypogamous couples in terms of expectation of college graduation and actual college graduation. Among the possible mechanisms behind this female advantage, only the father's and the mother's occupation could be explored with the data at hand, but none of them explain this advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to outline a new approach to the comparative analysis of student finance systems based on social rights, an approach widely applied in other areas of social policy. It focuses on rights codified in national legislation and financed by central governments, and the collection of indicators measuring formal eligibility and entitlements using model family analyses techniques. We illustrate the usefulness of the approach by exploring the relationship between the generosity and the degree of low-income targeting of student support in 21 OECD countries. The results show that student support is less generous in countries that concentrate benefits on students from low-income families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the engagement of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with the higher education sector. Detailed empirical case studies probe the ultimate failure to launch of the OECD's Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes initiative, as well as the recent demise of the long-established Institutional Management in Higher Education programme and the development of a new initiative on the evaluation of higher education system performance. The analysis is informed by a theoretical framework drawn from the wider international organization literature, focusing on internal organizational dynamics and the manner in which international organizations seek to construct their external authority. A complex portrait of the OECD as a policy actor correspondingly emerges, focused on agenda-setting within the organization in terms which highlight the interplay of organizational, governmental and stakeholder interests. This is further suggestive of a broader research agenda exploring emerging international-level policy processes in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]