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How does studying in the United States affect Chinese doctoral engineering graduates' career decisions? The present study is based on semi‐structured interviews with 16 Chinese engineering graduates who completed their doctorates in the United States, focusing on two critical aspects of their career decisions: returning to China and pursuing academic careers. First, the findings categorise Chinese doctoral engineering graduates into four types based on intention to return to China: fresh returnees, advanced returnees, hesitant stayers and resolute stayers. Second, the findings describe the reasons why they pursued academic or non‐academic careers. In particular, the study explores how the graduates' learning experiences during their doctoral study in the United States affected them in terms of the research field, industry experiences, information gained and expectations about working conditions. In the decision process, it was important for doctoral students to adopt positive and open attitudes and exercise self‐agency to identify the most appropriate directions for their careers. The study has contributions to the agency theory in career decision‐making and social implications for international doctoral students to navigate the career decision process after completing doctoral programmes abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scoping review maps key studies on the impact of technological advancement on higher education students' employability. Through the analysis of 29 studies on university graduates' study-to-work transition in the context of the latest technological development, key results underline the changing nature of jobs and suggest that the impact of technological unemployment depends on the occupations and tasks examined. The study calls for universities to reinterpret employability in the era of uncertainty but also discusses higher education and system policy interventions to prepare for the technological disruption in the labour market transition. Policy recommendations suggest defining clearer scopes (e.g., automation or AI) when evaluating the impact of technological advancement in the higher education research context and reducing the knowledge gaps for skills and mindsets necessary for future graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New preferential policies in China promise to increase the number of rural students entering top-tier universities, where there is a wider path to a higher social status. While a substantial body of literature has investigated rural students' trajectories to university, there is a dearth of systematic empirical studies on the academic success of rural students in colleges and universities. This study seeks to address this gap by examining the academic achievement of representative samples of students entering an elite university in China, including their place of origin, family background, school experience, and the characteristics that align with their academic performance. The data suggest no significant difference in academic performance obtained by urban and rural students with respect to average grade point average (over four years). It also suggests that fathers' occupations may not be associated with the academic achievements of students from different families. However, the data suggest a relatively clear school effect on the academic performance of students at University S. The study enriches the discussions of the inequality issue in China's higher education sector. It also enriches the literature in sociology of education by looking at the relative strength of the relationship between the possible causes and outcomes of schooling.

Research on the career trajectories of doctoral recipients often assumes that all PhD students begin in roughly the same starting position. Consequently, the impact of pre-programme experiences remains understudied. This qualitative study draws on 59 interviews with PhD students studying in mainland China and Hong Kong to explore the influence of learning experiences during the master's degree programme on planned PhD career trajectories. Using identity-trajectory theory, we find that students with a master's degree had greater research expertise, a more prominent research profile, more established academic networks, and greater familiarity with the requirements of the academic profession and academic job market. This enabled them to adapt to institutional expectations and have a better-informed motivation for pursuing a PhD to become an academic. Based on these findings, we argue that having a master's degree gives PhD students a competitive advantage over peers without master's degrees. Our findings have implications for the importance of research training in master's education and the relevance of master's programmes for PhD admission policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback processes are crucial in doctoral supervision but require adaptation to meet the changing nature of the doctorate, and increasing impetus to publish during the candidature. This study builds on concepts of authentic feedback and feedback literacy to chart possibilities for the development of feedback socialization in doctoral education. Semi-structured interviews with twenty doctoral supervisors in a faculty of education in Hong Kong aimed to investigate their understandings of feedback, its enactment within the doctoral process, and broader feedback inputs beyond the supervisor. Data were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis and trustworthiness was enhanced through a member checking focus group with a sub-set of four of the interviewees. The analysis is informed by sociocultural theory with emphasis on co-construction of insights between supervisors and doctoral students. The findings highlight supervisors' understandings of feedback as comments, interaction and follow-up; and authentic feedback generated from presenting at conferences or submitting to journals. A contribution of the paper lies in bringing to bear conceptual insights from feedback research in undergraduate education to inform feedback in doctoral supervision. We deploy the concept of authentic feedback, practices that resemble those of the relevant workplace, to demonstrate how journal peer review facilitates the socialization of doctoral students into academic publishing norms. Key supervisor roles lie in guiding the enactment of responses to peer review, and supporting the development of resilience. Proposed features of supervisors' feedback literacy include sociocultural-based dialogue and co-construction, emphasis on the enactment of feedback and working with authentic feedback of different forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the current status and practices of master's programmes at Sino‐foreign cooperative universities (SFCUs) in China. A document analysis of university publications is conducted on 133 master's programmes at nine SFCUs. The findings show the diversified development of disciplines and heterogeneity across nine universities. By examining how these programmes entangle with neoliberal ideas, marketisation and western orientation are found to be mobilised and reinforced in the internationalisation process. From the postcolonial perspective, this study identifies the practices of mimicry and resistance in operating master's programmes under transnational partnerships. The findings have implications in terms of educational equalities, the implementation of master's programmes in transnational higher education and the balance between home and host institutions in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obtaining a tertiary degree no longer guarantees entry to the best occupational positions in today's labour market. Success is no longer about "more" education, but about "better" education for university graduates. This study aims to understand whether university prestige in Korea accounts for occupational outcomes in both monetary and non-monetary aspects, such as salaries and job satisfaction. The study particularly focuses on the way different levels of university prestige are affected by gender. The fourth wave data from the Korean Education and Employment Panel were used, providing information from the results of a panel survey of university graduates in terms of their social and academic background and job employment status. Results show that university prestige continues to matters in occupational outcomes in particular, for wage, but it is not significant for job satisfaction. The effect is more significant among male graduates than among female graduates.

Studies of higher education by scholars based in Asia have been growing in volume, following worldwide trends. To a large extent, this growth has been driven by East Asian countries, but little is known about the characteristics of the contribution of these countries. This study analyses their overall and specific contribution. The paper concludes that systemic development and its internationalization, have different impacts on trends towards international publication of higher education research and on the collaborative networks nurtured and developed in each East Asian country. The main finding is that these countries present different realities in terms of engagement in internationally focused higher education literature among their national research communities. Yet, each country has made a wide-ranging contribution to international higher education research literature over time; each has a potentially decisive role in the further integration and development of higher education research in Asia over the coming years; and also, possibly, in the development of a regional higher education system.

This study aims to explore the development of higher education research in South Korea based on historical and scientometric perspectives. After the evolution of the country's higher education research community is presented, articles focusing on higher education from 1995 to 2012 are analysed. In total, 145 articles in international journals and 1,385 articles in national journals are collected and the publication patterns are compared in terms of research themes, methods and level of analysis between national and international journals. The results show that higher education research in South Korea still tends to focus on a limited set of research topics and research approaches despite the recent growth in research volumes and interests. In addition, there is still a lack of engagement in the international academic community. This study suggests that higher education research in the country needs to be more diversified with regard to research themes and methodologies, and it also needs to have an outward perspective with active engagement in the international academic community.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of administrative staff's job competency on their job satisfaction in a Korean research university. We conceptualized job satisfaction into three subcomponents: satisfaction in the job field, in the workplace, and with the actual task. In the regression analysis, we included demographics, inner motivation, work environments, and nature of work (e.g. clarity of task) factors as the predictors of job satisfaction. We included job competency as a main research variable in the model. This study found that the administrative staff's interpersonal skills affect their overall job satisfaction, and that each dimension of job competency (organizational understanding, problem solving, interpersonal skills, ICT skills, and global competency) has a different impact on the different dimensions of job satisfaction (job field, workplace, and job task).

In the prestige economy of higher education, research productivity is highly prized. Previous research indicates, however, a gender gap with respect to research output. This gap is often explained by reference to familial status and responsibilities. In this article, we examine the research productivity gender gap from an international perspective by undertaking a gendered analysis of the Changing Academic Profession Survey. We suggest that family is not, in all cases, operating as a form of negative equity in the prestige economy of higher education. In addition, we argue that an over-reliance on an explanatory framework that positions family-related variables as central to the research productivity gender gap might well be drawing our attention from significant structural and systemic discriminatory practices within the profession.

This study analyzes whether academics with advanced degrees from foreign universities are more research productive than their domestic counterparts in the three selected East Asian higher education systems--Korea, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. The three systems have relatively large proportions of foreign degree holders among their professoriates. The data for this study is drawn from the Changing Academic Profession survey. In our negative binominal regression analysis, we found that foreign degree holders are not more research productive than their colleagues with domestic degrees, and even slightly less productive than domestic degree holders in soft disciplines (arts, humanities, and social sciences) in Korea unless they have further foreign post-doc experience after their PhD. Furthermore, foreign degree holders are less productive in hard disciplines (natural sciences, engineering, and bio-medical sciences) in Malaysia. Finally, we discuss the findings and attribute them to contextual differences between the three localities.

This study examined job satisfaction and job stress across 19 higher education systems. We classified the 19 countries according to their job satisfaction and job stress and applied regression analysis to test whether new public management has impacts on either or both job satisfaction and job stress. According to this study, strong market driven countries are in the high stress group and European countries are in the high satisfaction group. The classification implies that market oriented managerial reforms are the main source of academic stress while the high social reputation of academics in their society and academic autonomy are the source of job satisfaction. Our regression analysis also shows that the new public management which is measured by the performance-based management in this study is the main source of academic job stress. In addition, this study highlighted the higher education systems that are classified as the high satisfaction and high stress group. These countries represent the conflicting nature of current academic society--on the one hand they are satisfied, but on the other they are highly stressful.

This study explores Korean academics' changes in research productivity by career stage. Career stage in this study is defined as a specific cohort based on one's length of job experience, with those in the same stage sharing similar interests, values, needs, and tasks; it is categorized into fledglings, maturing academics, established academics, and patriarchs. Academics' research productivity in each career stage is analysed, and these characteristics are compared across academic disciplines. In addition, the factors influencing research productivity in different career stages are examined. The results indicate that research productivity among academics changes according to their career stage, and its pattern differs across academic disciplines. Thus, there is a need to provide proper reward systems or career development programs in consideration of such differences.

This study explores higher education research in Asia. Drawing on scientometrics, the mapping of science and social network analysis, this paper examines the publications of 38 specialised journals on higher education over the past three decades. The findings indicate a growing number of higher education research publications but the proportion of Asian publications in relation to the total world publications in higher education research remains stationary. The higher education research community in Asia is heavily concentrated in a few countries and universities, resting on a relatively small number of core scholars who publish research in the international specialised higher education journals. In response to increasing challenges in Asian higher education systems, the paper suggests that the higher education research community in Asia needs to be expanded and include more regional and international collaborations.