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This study creates a novel inventory that characterizes factors influencing the research agendas of researchers in all fields of knowledge: the Multi-dimensional Research Agendas Inventory-Revised (MDRAI-R). The MDRAI-R optimizes an initial inventory designed for the social sciences (the MDRAI) by reducing the number of items per dimension, improving the inventory’s psychometric properties, and including new dimensions (“Academia Driven” and “Society Driven”) that reflect the greater influence of social and organizational structures on knowledge production and demands for research impact. This inventory enhances our ability to measure research activities at a time when researchers’ choices matter more than ever, and it will be of interest to researchers, policy makers, research funding agencies, and university and research organizations.

This article explores the experiences of male and female academics in China's higher education system concerning career progression and examines how they perceive the challenges faced by the opposite gender. Our analysis of interviews with 40 academics from a research university revealed that academics' experience of career progression is informed by gendered divisions of labour at home and work and by gendered role expectations that are prevalent in Chinese culture. Female academics reported performing a disproportionate amount of household work: some felt satisfied with having moderately successful academic careers, whereas others aspired to do more but grappled with the difficulties of doing so. In contrast, male academics mentioned great pressure to pursue promotion and career progression: they reported feeling less work-family stress but were fearful of failing in their role as breadwinners. Male and female academics showed mixed comprehension of each other's plight, but in general, female academics recognised that male academics faced higher career expectations but lower household burdens, and male academics felt that female academics had lower career expectations and many more burdens and constraints. Male academics tended to stress biological and societal reasons for gender differences in Chinese academia, whereas female academics highlighted the power of cultural and social beliefs. We argue that the challenges faced by Chinese academics can only be mitigated if gender-specific promotion paths that recognise men's and women's social roles and obligations are made available.

Publication pressure is perceived to be filtering down into doctoral education worldwide. We explore the causes and effects of the perceived centrality of publishing among doctoral students, emphasising the impact of publication pressure on students' identity trajectories. We draw on a qualitative analysis of 90 mainland Chinese doctoral students at universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau. We find that the credentialisation of publications in the increasingly competitive and publication-dominant academic labour market results in publishing-centred doctoral journeys. Our key finding is that the centrality of publishing affects every aspect of identity trajectory development: it causes doctoral students to commodify knowledge production, devalues coursework, conference participation, and teaching assistantships, encourages students to regard their supervisors as publishing facilitators and their peers as rivals rather than collaborators, and marginalises engagement with external stakeholders. In discussing these dimensions, we emphasise the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates' abilities and honours in academic recruitment and call for policies to curtail the overemphasis on research output in academic evaluations.

This study's principal objective was to explore the statistically predictive power of academics' research agendas for their job dissatisfaction beyond demographics. Five hundred and forty-seven academics from the eight publicly funded universities in Hong Kong responded to the Multi-Dimensional Research Agenda Inventory-12 (MDRAI-12) and the Job Dissatisfaction Scale (JDS). Three key findings were obtained. First, good psychometrics for the MDRAI-12 and the JDS were obtained. Second, research agendas varied by age, gender, academic rank, and academic discipline, while job dissatisfaction varied by age, academic rank, and institutional ranking. Third and most importantly, when age, gender, academic rank, academic discipline, and institutional ranking were statistically controlled, trailblazing research agendas generally negatively contributed to job dissatisfaction, whereas a cohesive (conservative) research agenda positively predicted job dissatisfaction, as hypothesized. Implications of the findings are discussed for academics and university senior managers.

This study examines the procedures, criteria, and decision-making in doctoral admissions at China's leading research universities. A content analysis was performed on doctoral admissions texts (N = 312) from 264 faculties of C9 League universities, representing China's elite research-intensive universities. The results show that the admissions procedures tend to highlight previous research and academic merit, which is to be expected for entry to doctoral studies but nonetheless seems to presuppose that all PhD students will follow an academic career path. Several standard practices were found to ensure the rigour and fairness of admissions procedures, such as the adoption of a centralised rather than a decentralised model, the setting of written examinations as a default assessment method, and the highlighting of tangible past achievements, especially pre-doctoral research outputs. There is a lack of supervisor engagement in admissions decision-making, which hinders them from evaluating applicants' potential and degree of fit with their interests. The findings provide evidence of the multiple logics and discourses involved in doctoral admissions in China and offer practical implications for improving the admissions system.

Gender inequality and bias persists in academia worldwide despite remarkable progress in recent decades. This issue is underexplored in the context of Chinese academia. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews with male and female academics at a Chinese research university, this paper assesses the extent and manifestations of gender inequality, bias, and discrimination in the Chinese academic profession. The findings show that most of the male academics had gender-blind perspectives and believed that Chinese academia has an egalitarian structure that is fairer to women than other sectors of activity, and allows them to attain career success. Concurrently, some were suspicious of female academics' success and explained it based on sexual innuendo. Nonetheless, a considerable number of male academics felt privileged compared to women, explaining this privilege in terms of social and biological factors. The female academics mostly perceived no overt discrimination in academia but described subtle discrimination and biases in which gender could shape opportunities and career advancement. Our findings highlight differences in the perceptions of male and female academics, the prevalence of male power in academia, and micropolitical practices that (re)produce gender inequality.

For more than a century, whether or not the research-teaching nexus exists has remained an intensely debated issue in the global academy at both the conceptual and empirical levels. Situating teaching styles within the context of teaching, conceptualizing research agendas as a dimension of research, and using academic self-efficacy as a mediator, the present study empirically investigated the research-teaching nexus. Participants were 256 academics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields from all of the eight institutions funded by the University Grants Committee in Hong Kong. In the context of participating in the "Academic Profession in the Knowledge-based Society" (APIKS) international survey between late 2017 and early 2018, the participants responded to a short version of the Multi-Dimensional Research Agendas Inventory, a short version of the Research-Teaching Efficacy Inventory, and two scales from the Thinking Styles in Teaching Inventory. Results showed that academics' research agendas statistically predicted their teaching styles -- after age, gender, academic rank, and institutional ranking were considered. Furthermore, academic self-efficacy, especially research efficacy, provided a pathway from research agendas to one of the two teaching styles examined. Limitations and theoretical contributions of the research are discussed; and practical implications of the research findings are proposed for academics in STEM fields and for university senior managers.

Most studies of academic inbreeding have focused on assessing its impact on scholarly practices, outputs, and outcomes. Few studies have concentrated on the other possible effects of academic inbreeding. This paper draws on a large number of studies on academic inbreeding to explore how the practice has been conceptualized, how it has emerged, and how it has been rationalized in the creation and development of higher education systems. Within this framework, the paper also explores how academic inbreeding shapes and maintains a powerful academic oligarchy, leading to the stonewalling of both knowledge and institutional change to maintain social and political structures somewhat akin to those of medieval societies. The paper shows that the key to mitigating academic inbreeding practices lies in ensuring that academic recruitment processes are open, meritocratic, and transparent. However, a more difficult task is to change longstanding mentalities and disrupt a system that serves the interests of certain groups but not the advancement of knowledge or the fulfillment of universities' social mandates.

Academic research has evolved tremendously over the last century. The middle of the twentieth century saw the development of research and the strengthening of trust both within academia and between academics and external actors. Since the later part of the twentieth century, however, the development of academic research has been characterised by reduced trust in universities and academics. It is argued that the lowering degrees of trust in universities and science are reflected in the current incentives in academia, often driven by governmental funding agencies, and the result of the altered position of universities within innovation systems. Universities are still important contributors to knowledge production, but they have slowly become more peripheral within innovation systems. Rather than setting their own research directions, they face strong incentives to do research primarily to serve others. This requires them to interact with organisations with which they have little in common and with which they find it difficult to communicate. The academic research pendulum seems to have swung too much towards knowledge transfer and application, with problematic outcomes. These developments indicate that it is necessary to reassess the purposes and potential benefits of academic research to restore trust in universities and increase the integrity and usefulness of research.

This paper explores how women academics in Chinese higher education have been understood as a topic of research by conducting a comprehensive review of publications on the theme in Chinese national academic journals, that is, national journals written in Chinese. The study identifies publication trends and key research issues concerning academic women in China, adopting a knowledge mapping perspective that unveils research and methodological choices, including data collection methods used in Chinese national journals since the mid-1980s, when the first publication on women academics was identified. The study finds that despite the rapid expansion of the population of women academics in the Chinese higher education system, this topic has been intermittently researched: interest in it peaked in the early 2010s but has declined since then. Past interest in the topic would be largely activated by governmental policy considerations and changes, but would become relatively dormant during periods of lower policy activity. The research has been mainly focused on policy and practice, and has lacked long-term perspectives; it has not always acknowledged societal and structural challenges that academic women face, and has not engaged in theory building. The latter is probably because much of the knowledge production has been based on personal opinions and views, and has suffered from a lack of critical thinking, a reliance on largely unsophisticated methods, and findings that are not generalisable.

In contemporary higher education systems, funding is increasingly associated with performativity, assessment, and competition, and universities are seeking different forms of financing their activities. One of these new forms is crowdfunding, a tool enabled by the digitalization of finance. Based on data from the UK higher education system and two crowdfunding platforms, our study adds to previous crowdfunding research in academic settings that have, thus far, focused on research projects, and assesses who is participating, their level of engagement and the resources they have gathered from crowdfunding. Our findings show that crowdfunding is used more by universities that have fewer resources. These universities are more teaching-oriented, less prestigious, and have a student body largely derived from lower socio-economic sectors of society. The popularity of crowdfunding in this type of university suggests that crowdfunding may enhance the democratization of higher education funding. However, as optimal crowdfunding participation and engagement requires high academic-to-student ratios and total-staff-to-academic-staff ratios, universities facing a greater financial precarity may be disadvantaged in their access to and engagement with crowdfunding. Differentials between part-time and full-time student ratios may exacerbate this disadvantage. Our study suggests that crowdfunding is a viable means of obtaining additional financing for learning activities complementing the fundings from other sources, but raises concerns about the use of crowdfunding as a burden to academics and students to find resources to meet learning experiences that ought to be provided by universities in the first place.

The involvement of non-academics in academic research is key to boosting knowledge exchange and ensuring that academic research is more effective in contributing to tackling the challenges faced by organizations and citizens. Although incentives, together with new organizational and knowledge producing modes, have fostered this involvement, the literature has found that the willingness of academics to collaborate with non-academics is mixed and related to individual traits and preferences, conflicting working logics, and other constraints. This study contributes to this literature by assessing the strategic research agendas of academics as a novel factor in determining their willingness to involve non-academic peers in research activities. The findings underlined the critical importance of academics' strategic research agendas in determining their engagement with non-academics in their research. The findings also showed conflicting logics, suggesting that PhD training, career progression, and organizational incentives fostering knowledge output activities need to be considered and adapted.

There is a growing need to support diversified career pathways for doctoral students. However, research on the determinants of doctoral students' preferences to pursue future careers outside academia is still limited, or indeed is absent when careers in the government and nonprofit sectors (GNS) are considered. Using data from the 2019 "Nature" PhD Students Survey, this paper explores factors that influence PhD students' preferences for GNS career pathways. The results show that the personal attributes, motivations, and concerns of students considering careers outside academia are generally similar, notwithstanding their career preference by sector of activity. However, the results also suggest that doctoral students who lean towards GNS careers have different personal attributes, motivations, and concerns than those wanting to work in the business sector. Specifically, compared with those preferring employment in the business sector, doctoral students who are concerned about the political landscape and care less about the uncertainty of career prospects are more inclined to work in the nonprofit sector. Compared with those preferring employment in the business sector, those who enjoy creativity and the academic environment tend to prefer employment in the government sector. Older and female doctoral students are also more likely to consider GNS career pathways.

Academic inbreeding is a phenomenon that has been studied mostly from the standpoint of its association with research productivity. The focus has been on knowledge creation outputs and outcomes, while little to no attention has been given to the association of academic inbreeding with knowledge creation strategies and processes in academia. This article focusses on the latter, confirming that academic inbreeding is detrimental to the research aspirations, innovativeness, risk-taking, and multidisciplinarity engagement of academics' research agendas, as predicted by literature. These findings, based on a sample of more than 7000 academics from all fields of knowledge, working in more than 140 countries, do not find a greater influence of the PhD mentor on the strategic research agendas of homegrown academics as the literature would expect. The findings also underline critical differences between homegrown academics and silver-corded academics, stressing that the latter category of academics should not be considered as part of the academic inbreeding process (which concept rests on immobility), but rather understood as a category of limited institutional mobility that deserves further study.

Women academics have represented half of the academic body at Chinese higher education institutions since 2018. However, national and international scientific research on women academics in China has been limited, in contrast with the numerous international publications on women academics working in European, Oceanian, and North American higher education systems. Motivated by this relative lack, this study takes a historical perspective to analyze the role played and the expectations and challenges faced by women academics in Chinese higher education. We organize this history into three periods: (1) the emergence of the modern, Western-influenced university, starting at the beginning of the twentieth century; (2) the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949; and (3) the contemporary period, beginning with China's opening up in the late 1970s. For each of these periods, the study identifies how traditions, changing cultural and societal beliefs concerning gender, and the development of the higher education system in China transformed the role, positioning and activities of women academics. This study contributes to a better understanding of the current status of women academics in China, what has changed, and the challenges they still face to gain further prominence in the country's fast-developing higher education system.

This study explored factors that influence academics to collaborate in research with their doctoral students. It focused on Hong Kong academics, using data from the Academic Profession in Knowledge Society survey conducted in 2017-2018. The study found that academics' research collaboration with doctoral students is influenced by several factors, including research and teaching styles and institutional conditions. Specifically, those academics whose research agendas were characterised by "discovery" and "collaboration" were more likely to report working with their doctoral students, whereas those whose research agendas focused more on "convergence" were less likely to do so. The more "legislative" the academics' teaching style was, the less they collaborated with their doctoral students. Independence in research and institutional expectations of external funding increased the propensity to collaborate with doctoral students. Academics in the humanities were found to collaborate less with their doctoral students than those in other disciplines. The study suggests that the scholarly preference and styles of the academics, as well as their disciplinary and institutional backgrounds, need to be considered to improve research collaboration between academics and their doctoral students.

The study on which this article reports explored the role of education agents in international student mobility, developing a better understanding of how they operate, behave and think when dealing with the admissions processes of universities overseas. The behaviours and reasoning, the "modus operandi," and positioning of education agents are analysed using agency theory; specifically, the information-asymmetric relations that they have with the principals they serve. The context analysed was characterised by two types of admissions practices: (a) direct admissions to the university without the need for any preparatory courses and (b) dual admissions involving enrolment in the host universities' preparatory language centres before university enrolment proper. Students and their families are principals in both types of admissions processes, whereas universities overseas serve as a principal in the dual admissions process. The findings demonstrate a mix of transparent practices and those that border to unethical practices in international university admissions services, as well as student dependence on service providing agents who operate free from accountability. Agents are identified as a cog in the machine of international higher education, which increasingly works as a mechanism of socioeconomic reproduction.

Amongst all jurisdictions, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China has been one of the most effective in limiting cases of COVID-19, despite being one of the first places to be affected by the pandemic in early 2020. In the months since the first case was confirmed, COVID-19 has affected all aspects of Hong Kong society, including the higher education sector. In this collective reflective essay, we describe the effects of these unexpected external events on academics' lives and the responses of higher education institutions. Specifically, we address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on academics, their professional relationships, institutional frameworks, and Hong Kong's higher education sector as a whole. We conclude that the most significant effect of the pandemic is "uncertainty," together with new realities expressed in sayings such as 'living with Zoom, learning from webinars'; 'you will be informed "in due course"', stay calm "until further notice"'; and 'people are stuck, but business is on steroids'. The essay further describes a three-pronged institutional reaction to the pandemic, focused on "control," "support," and "positioning." It concludes with critical views on the way 'useful' knowledge in today's higher education is defined and how concepts and practices have been challenged during the pandemic.

The presence of gender disparities in academia was assessed by analysing the characteristics of the research agendas of academics. Multivariate analysis of variance and structural equation modelling coupled with multi-group analysis were used to identify different gender trajectories. The research agenda preferences of women were less risky and less focused on fields likely to lead to scientific discovery, but were organised in a more collaborative way than those of men. In addition, institutional characteristics were found to influence the research agenda preferences of both women and men. However, the perceived autonomy allowed by a university was more important for female than for male academics to develop more ambitious, collaborative, risky and multidisciplinary efforts. Female academics also needed more time after completing their PhD to develop a preference for riskier research agendas, but past research outputs, the number of co-authors and mobility did not change their agendas.

China is advancing in its bid to internationalize higher education, but little is known to date about the life satisfaction of overseas students in that country. Life satisfaction can be understood as the extent to which individuals' experiences in a host country help them achieve their personal goals and satisfy their expectations regarding acculturation. This paper examines past research, especially international literature, to provide an overview of factors that may influence the life satisfaction of international students in countries other than their own, and looks particularly at those matters that may also affect overseas students in China. Comparisons are made between variables identified in general and those in Asia, and specifically China. The findings have implications for policy-makers and university practitioners seeking to improve educational quality and counseling support services for international students.

All fields of knowledge are challenged to adopt newer, more sophisticated methodologies to cope with growing complexity. Phenomena under study require further multidisciplinary and mixed methods collaborations to achieve expertise able to improve research strategies and practices. Furthermore, traditional methodological approaches face limits to their analytical reach. Here, we demonstrate opportunities from adopting newer, more sophisticated methodologies in the field of higher education (HE) research by comparing three case studies. We argue that such methods and data innovate the mapping and understanding of global HE. These studies uncover novel field characterizations, enabled via analysis of tens of thousands of HE authors and articles over several decades to assess how journal publication, topics, and levels of analysis (individual, organizational, and system) have evolved. Our results imply that to better understand the future of HE worldwide and to address growing challenges, newer methodological directions and data sources will be key to facilitate more comprehensive examinations of the globalizing field. However, our analysis also highlights the technical and learning challenges in implementing these methodologies; thus, we argue for the need to promote more sophisticated methodological training of current and future generations of HE researchers as well as strengthened collaborations across disciplinary, methodological, and cultural boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer review in journals is in crisis, and its current situation and sustainability are increasingly concerning for academics and scientific communities. We identify this crisis as part of an evolutionary step in the continuous development of science, arguing that peer review maintains a central role. We analyse the emergence and historical development of peer review, identifying its role as crucial to the legitimisation of global science, particularly in guaranteeing quality control in the scientific process of massification—despite its flaws. We then focus on the crisis as part of the recent second wave of massification stemming from 'publish or perish' dynamics, which overburden those involved in peer review management and activities. Based on this crisis and given that the alternative models to peer review rely on the same core ideals, we argue that the current scenario represents a golden opportunity for the peer‐review process to adapt by correcting some of its known biases, becoming more inclusive and relevant, and gaining recognition for its crucial role in career progression and in the training of the researchers of tomorrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research productivity is a common topic in the literature, but peer reviewing for journals has received less attention, although it is a key activity of academic research. We help to fill this knowledge gap by assessing the determinants of peer review engagement and quality in scientific journals. We do so by analysing the combined information from a survey of academics working in different parts of the world and various fields of science, along with their publication and peer review information gathered from Scopus and Publons/Web of Science. We find that age, gender, and some dimensions of academics' strategic research agendas are important predictors of peer review engagement. We also find that academic inbreeding along the educational path has a negative association with the quality of peer-review activities. However, we find no statistically significant results concerning academic inbreeding related to the professional trajectory and peer review engagement and quality. Equally importantly, our results suggest that although the activities of publishing and peer reviewing are closely associated, peer review tends to be ancillary to publishing, rather than the other way around. Furthermore, the greater the perceived availability of resources, including research funding throughout an academic's career, the greater the focus is on publishing and the less the focus is on peer reviewing. These findings are discussed in relation to the current valuation of publication versus peer reviewing in terms of scientific and academic career recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demands for academic research placed on contemporary universities are closely related to the levels of innovative research they are expected to produce. Concurrently, both governments and university management strive to make the production of academic research more cost-efficient and have implemented measures to ensure this. Top-down policies influenced by the concepts of new public management and managerialism have been introduced, pushing for competitiveness and increased performativity in academic research setups. These policies and guidelines have been criticised by academics as having eroded collegiality and autonomy, which are considered necessary to achieve quality research. The focus of this study is on the social sciences and aligns with this critique, demonstrating that autonomy and collegiality are the key organisational features fostering multidisciplinary, collaborative and riskier research agendas that lead to breakthroughs. Academics with high levels of organisational commitment are more likely to create research agendas that assume more conservative, discipline-bound and risk-averse traits, with less potential to achieve the intended innovative research outcomes.

This paper assesses the evolution and current situation of the Chinese research system, mainly the academic research system from 1996 to 2017, using trend analysis and the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) index. Despite the impressive growth of China's knowledge capability, as measured by the number of publications in the international indexed literature over the past four decades, the country is still in a catching-up pattern with the world's most advanced research systems, instead of being a full-fledged scientific superpower. The analysis shows that China's publication growth has been to some extent inflated, as it was boosted by the inclusion of Chinese language journals in the international indexed literature. Therefore, this growth should be considered in a more moderate light. The competitiveness of China's disciplinary areas appears somewhat stalled when comparing the 1996-2000 and 2013-2017 periods, during which the same STEM-related disciplinary areas were the most competitive. This finding reveals not only a specialised knowledge structure, typical of catching-up countries, but also underperforming and neglected disciplinary areas in the social sciences, humanities and health sciences from a research funding standpoint. Based on this assessment, it is recommended that policymakers and university administrators change their focus from research quantity to research visibility by allocating funding in a less concentrated way to STEM fields, while promoting collaborative initiatives that can encourage the qualifications of academics and the visibility of the knowledge they produce.

Recent developments in higher education have placed greater emphasis on performance and accountability and raised concerns about increasing levels of stress among academics. Stress not only influences academic productivity but may also affect institutional commitment, which is key to guaranteeing academics' organisational stability, identity and performance at the university. This study examines how the stress of academics working in Hong Kong, which has a highly competitive and performativity oriented higher education system, relates to an institutional commitment to their universities. Through the use of a methodology that handles endogeneity bias, this relationship was analysed using socio-demographic data, information on characteristics of the institutional environment, and academic-work-related data from the Academic Profession in Knowledge Society (APIKS) questionnaire conducted in Hong Kong in 2017/2018. The main finding of this study is that the more the job becomes a strain, the greater the academic's institutional commitment to the university. We argue that stress was positively associated with greater institutional commitment due to Hong Kong's competitive working culture, as no statistically significant differences in stress and institutional commitment were found among those in different academic fields of knowledge and universities. Analysis of determinants of stress and institutional commitment showed that independence in research, interest in current work, availability of career opportunities, and collegial decision-making reduced stress and increased institutional commitment. Conversely, pressure to obtain external funding and excessive administrative work increase stress and reduce institutional commitment. Based on these findings, universities should institute balanced policies that promote research autonomy, collegiality and flexible career opportunities in academic work, whilst designing new ways to more congenially integrate the ubiquitous demand for external funding into academic life, and minimising administrative procedures which are not attuned with creative academic environments.

This research pioneered the investigation of the role of doctoral students' thinking styles in their program satisfaction and perceived intellectual competence. Participants were 285 STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) students in Hong Kong. Results showed that students' thinking styles as measured by the Thinking Styles Inventory--Revised II (Sternberg, Wagner, & Zhang, 2007) statistically significantly predicted their program satisfaction and perceived intellectual competence as assessed by two of the scales in the newly constructed Graduate Student Survey (Shin et al., 2015)--beyond their gender, program year, and academic discipline. Findings have brought new insights into the assessment of doctoral students' program satisfaction and perceived intellectual competence. At the same time, findings have contributed to the literature on intellectual styles and that on doctoral education in STEM fields. Practical implications of the findings are proposed for STEM doctoral students in understanding their own ways of thinking and program experiences and outcomes, as well as for academics and senior managers in their efforts to enhance students' access to positive program experiences and outcomes.

The time for completing a Ph.D. continues to be longer than desirable in most higher education systems worldwide. This is a concern for research funding agencies, universities, academics, and doctoral students facing increasingly constrained labour markets, particularly in academia. This study assesses the role of Ph.D. funding on the time to Ph.D. completion, revisiting literature that has mainly focused on the USA and used single university case studies as the main methodological approach. In this study, a representative national sample of doctorate holders working in Portugal is examined. Following the premise of previous studies, and using Breneman's and the concept of credentials as our main key theoretical approaches, it adds a new element to the analysis: publishing during the Ph.D. related to research funding and time to completion. Our analysis shows that the time to complete the Ph.D. generally results from a combination of funding conditions, publishing during the Ph.D., and an associated time strategy. In particular, our results show that Ph.D. funding increases the time to complete the Ph.D. However, if those receiving Ph.D. funding also publish during their Ph.D. programme, it reduces the time to complete the degree. Funded students who publish finish the Ph.D. earlier than funded students who do not. Unfunded Ph.D. students who are highly research productive take longer to complete the degree. The results also show that STEM students are more susceptible to the effects of funding and research productivity than non-STEM students. The types of funding support do not affect the time to the degree.

Due to significant government cuts to Higher Education funding in Southern European systems, their already underfunded universities were forced to increasingly compete for students as sources of additional revenue. Concurrently, families and students that continued to afford participation in Higher Education became more selective when choosing a university, realising the riskier investment that Higher Education participation had become. Through a competing destinations model and relying on all Italian private and public universities, this study finds that the competition forces characterising universities' attractiveness over the last decade have changed since the financial crisis of 2008. In a context of lower demand for Higher Education, the competition for students grew and universities in close proximity were better prepared to face the new challenges, leading to the growth of Higher Education clusters.

In this study, we analyse the relationship between competition and programmatic diversification in 75 Italian universities from the academic years of 2003/2004 to 2011/2012. Results show that local competition, rather than national competition, influences programmatic diversification. The relationship between local competition and programmatic diversification is found to be quadratic such that when competition increases, diversification decreases and specialisation increases, and both relationships are reversed after a certain threshold. We argue that under moderate levels of competition, universities tend to respond to local competition for students by differentiating their programmatic offerings from their competitors. However, when the level of competition is minimum or extreme, universities tend to follow an isomorphic strategy. After the reduction in student demand and the reform of the higher education system in 2008/2009, the relationship was no longer curvilinear because universities operating in extremely competitive environments began to adopt more risk-taking behaviour by engaging in diversification strategies.