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The heightened mobility of resources, ideas, and cultural practices across national borders--commonly known as "globalization"--entails changes in the contexts in which US research universities operate. We draw on recent developments in neo-institutional theory to understand these changes and their implications for the ways in which US universities compete for international doctoral students. Quantitative analyses of university-level data from 1990 to 2006 identify significant predictors of growth in this field, including state appropriations and state-supported research expenditures for public universities and net tuition receipts and number of full-time faculty members for private universities. We also highlight the ways in which returns have intensified, declined, or held relatively constant over time.

"Cost­-sharing" refers to the principle that a variety of sources contribute to the cost of higher education. This study utilizes university-­level data from the United States to explore the increasing shift of cost burdens from governments to students. Panel regression results suggest that the share of expenditures drawn from tuition increases as a college or university draws a larger share of its total enrolment from low-­income households. This, along with other findings, raises troubling questions of equity by suggesting that the burdens of heightened tuition reliance fall upon those who are least able to bear them.

The American academic research enterprise relies heavily on contributions made by foreign nationals. Of particular note is the large number of international postdocs employed at universities in the United States (US). Postdocs are among the fastest growing group of academic staff in the US, and over 50% of all postdocs in the US are temporary visa holders. While academic mobility is sometimes understood using a "push-pull" model, we argue that demand for educational migrants must be considered. Drawing from Marginson's ("Handbook on globalization and higher education." Edward Elger, Northampton, 2011; Marginson and Rhoades in "High Educ" 43:281-309, 2002) work, we develop a model for assessing local, national, and institutional (or local) variables that may shape the employment of international postdocs at universities in the United States, and we operationalize the model through a panel regression analysis using data covering the period 1989-2009. We find that the passage of time and federally supported research and development expenditures are strong predictors of postdoc employment. Institutional characteristics predict changes only in the subsample of private universities.

Ranking systems such as "The Times Higher Education's World University Rankings" and Shanghai Jiao Tong University's "Academic Rankings of World Universities" simultaneously mark global status and stimulate global academic competition. As international ranking systems have become more prominent, researchers have begun to examine whether global rankings are creating increased inequality within and between universities. Using a panel Tobit regression analysis, this study assesses the extent to which markers of inter-institutional stratification and organizational segmentation predict global status among US research universities as measured by position in ARWU. Findings indicate some support that both inter-institutional stratification and organizational segmentation predict global status.

While individuals in each country or part of the world face unique issues, many challenges facing higher education today are similar across the world. The great majority of higher education systems have grown in recent decades, enrolling far more students than they did in prior years and expanding their activities into new spheres such as economic development. Pressures associated with growth bring higher education officials face to face with the need for heightened transparency and accountability. Because growth in scope often brings rising costs, campus officials also face concerns about student access and greater affordability. Globalization compounds these challenges by facilitating growth in student enrollment, changes in the curriculum, and competition from expanded educational providers. In this chapter, the authors outline broad trends related to internationalization, growth, and competition in higher education. Higher education officials face myriad and complex issues, and institutional research (IR) officials can greatly assist with efforts to meet these challenges. The authors therefore leaven this discussion of broad trends with suggestions for ways that IR officers can help their institutions respond effectively to these challenges.

We examined baccalaureate colleges mission statements to better understand how these organizations represent themselves to potential students and other external constituent groups. We drew these documents from two sources, the colleges' official web sites and an archive constructed and maintained by "U.S. News and World Report." Most sampled colleges submitted revised or different mission statements to "U.S. News" than published officially on institutional websites. Our findings suggested that the communication patterns of baccalaureate colleges are both vague and idiosyncratic. Official mission statements often proved descriptive or appealed to normative concepts. The statements submitted to "U.S. News," by contrast, often utilized "strategically deployed shifters." These terms suggested legitimate content but eluded precise definition. Mission statements submitted to "U.S. News" thereby proved amenable to student recruitment efforts.

Using data collected from a qualitative case study of an online baccalaureate nursing program, we examined the influence of online degree programs on undergraduate student socialization and learning. We considered how components of socialization--knowledge acquisition, investment, and involvement--are influenced by the online context. The findings suggest the importance of considering non-academic influences in regards to nontraditional student experiences. The theoretical intersection of online learning and undergraduate student development offers new and significant areas of research, specifically related to the pedagogical role of faculty and the impact of social engagement. Implications for future research and practice are offered.

This paper uses Fligstein and Mc Adam's (2012, 2011) theory of the strategic action field, or ' SAF,' to highlight the ways in which individuals can act within cultural and material constraints to shape social processes. It applies these concepts to the Mercer University heresy trial of 1939, in which a group of students backed by fundamentalists from the conservative Protestant movement accused members of the University's faculty of unbelief. By understanding the organization, the social movement, and the higher education industry as ' SAFs,' the theory explains how the trial reached its unusual outcome, and suggests implications for broader understandings of organizational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research often considers vertical stratification between U.S. higher education institutions. Yet differences also exist within higher education institutions, which we term "organizational segmentation." We understand organizational segmentation as a consequence of the external "prestige economy," which favors research revenues from high-resource science and engineering fields relative to instructional revenues collected by low-resource humanities departments. We use qualitative data from 83 interviews with faculty in high- and low-resource departments to examine how organizational segmentation, academic work, and professionalization are shaped by external and internal resource pressures. We find that deprofessionalization has occurred in different ways for faculty in high- and low-resource academic units. Faculty in high-resource units, like Brint's (1994) "expert" professionals, depend on external research resources and shape their careers accordingly, whereas faculty in low-resource units rely upon teaching revenues distributed by campus administrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This multi-site qualitative study focuses on evangelical Christian colleges, which sit at the juncture of the institutionalized fields of religion and higher education. Because widely held norms and reward structures characterize institutionalized fields, these two social spheres stand ripe for conflict with one another. I conceptualize field-level conflicts by drawing on “classic” institutional theory. I illuminate campus officials’ responses to field-level conflicts using recent innovations in the neo-institutional tradition that emphasize agency, strategic action, and field-level hierarchy. Findings therefore both describe these colleges as organizations and refine emerging concepts in neo-institutional theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that rising institutional inequality is a component of individual-level inequality in the United States because U.S. higher education provides a diverse group of students with unequal access to different kinds of institutions. Using latent profile analysis, we classified all public and private nonprofit higher education institutions in the U.S. from 2005 to 2013 into seven categories. We held these categories stable over time and allowed institutions to move between them. "Good value" institutions were scarce and tended to limit access through selective admission. Only Subsidy Reliant institutions that were directly supported by government appropriations regularly provided good value seats to a racially diverse group of students. Yet the number of institutions in the Subsidy Reliant category declined markedly over time. The resulting system offered access to many students but provided limited opportunity to secure a good value seat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]