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This study uses critical discourse analysis to explain how legislators determine the role and contributions of academic researchers in Congressional legislative hearings. The discursive practices that legislators use serve to construct the social identity of academic witnesses, characterize witnesses’ qualifications, solicit information from witnesses, frame comments from witnesses, and amplify and mitigate witness testimony. The findings make visible the ways that legislators use the power of their positions to depict academic witnesses as both experts who offer independent knowledge and experts who validate or confirm a legislator’s preferences and priorities. The results have implications for academics who seek to improve connections between research and policy, and academics who seek to further advance the production of knowledge of federal policymaking processes.

This article introduces this volume, which is dedicated to expanding a theory- and evidence-based understanding of student loan problems. The authors review evidence to address fundamental questions related to student loan research: who borrows, why, and the consequences of debt for specific student populations. The authors outline how the articles collected in the volume address these fundamental questions, and discuss ways in which federal policy-makers may build on the insights that can be gained from this volume as they work on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

In this introductory essay to the special issue, we discuss the importance of regional and national contexts for understanding internationalization of higher education and provide contextual information about the cluster of former Soviet and Eastern bloc nations. Drawing from findings from the three studies included in the special issue, we also identify themes that may characterize the internationalization of higher education in former Soviet and Eastern bloc nations. We conclude the essay by discussing the value of comparative research on internationalization of higher education and identifying directions for future research.

University autonomy is a multi-dimensional concept. As previous studies have demonstrated, European universities have high levels of autonomy in some dimensions, but their autonomy is more limited in other dimensions. The European University Association (EUA) defines four dimensions of university autonomy: organizational autonomy, financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and academic autonomy. This paper uses statistical analyses to investigate whether these four dimensions of university autonomy are interconnected. Findings suggest that there is an overall lack of prominent, linear relationships among these dimensions, with the exception of staffing autonomy and academic autonomy, which are significantly positively linked to each other.

Although prior research establishes the forces that “push” and “pull” students to participate in foreign study, the transferability of findings from earlier studies is limited by the absence of theoretical grounding. In addition, relatively little is known about how a government-sponsored student mobility program promotes foreign study in a nation with a transitioning economy. Using case study methods, this study explores the characteristics of students who participate in such a program and identifies the programmatic characteristics and contextual forces that promote and limit participation. The findings shed light on the appropriate theoretical perspectives for understanding student participation in a government-sponsored mobility program and illustrate the need to consider how aspects of the national cultural, economic, and political context influence participation. The findings also raise several questions about how an international student mobility program should be structured to encourage participation and maximize benefits to individuals and society within a particular national context.

This article sheds light on the availability and characteristics of international scholarship programs that are sponsored by national and federal governments worldwide and that are intended to promote student mobility. Utilizing descriptive and cluster analyses, the article produces a framework for organizing the population of these programs. The analyses take into account both the central characteristics of programs and economic and political characteristics of the nations sponsoring the program. The typology produced in this analysis may be used by policy makers and researchers to facilitate cross-national comparisons of program design, implementation, and outcomes.

In this chapter, we reflect on how we frame our research on international scholarship programs within the field of comparative and international education and identify perspectives that influence our research. We also briefly describe the theories that shape our research: human capital theory and sociological perspectives that emphasize the centrality of context. We discuss emerging research on international scholarship programs and identify fruitful future directions for comparative and international research on higher education.

The idea that higher education institutions receiving public funds should be accountable for working towards socially desirable goals became increasingly popular on both sides of the Atlantic since the early 1990s. Policies have been introduced to promote accountability in higher education, including various models of performance assessment and performance, or output-based, funding. This paper offers an overview of recent empirical research on performance funding policies in the US and Europe. It compares and contrasts findings from multi-state stakeholder analyses, along with a review of preliminary evidence on the impact of performance funding policies on institutional behaviour and institutional performance. The systematic review of research evidence reveals that higher education institutions with a joint teaching-research mission are more likely to oppose performance funding measures than other academic and non-academic stakeholders, and that academic stakeholders consider performance funds an additional revenue source. The impact of performance funding policies on institutional behaviour and performance is found to be modest at best across studies.

This study utilizes qualitative research methods to explore the human capital benefits of one government-sponsored international scholarship program – Kazakhstan's Bolashak Scholars Program – and how program characteristics and other forces promote and limit these benefits. The findings raise a number of questions for policymakers, administrators, and researchers about how a government-sponsored international scholarship program should be structured so as to maximize human capital development for individuals and the sponsoring nation.