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This article highlights the nascent efforts between College Unbound, Brown University, and Providence College--three very different types of institutions in Providence, Rhode Island--to foster cross-institutional capacity for place-based community engagement. By collectively engaging our institutions, we experimented with what collaboration around community engagement might look like within our local context. In this article, we share our approach and reflections in working to cultivate a place-based collaboration that is community-centric and grounded in students' lived experiences, along with limitations, lessons learned, and next steps related to our collaborative work. Through our efforts, we situate cross-institutional collaborations as an opportunity for more sustained and transformative work within higher education community engagement.

This article proposes two models and four principles for creating taxonomies of transferable skills that reflect and enable cross-institutional partnership between academic and professional services colleagues. Such language or taxonomies provide a shared focus for all institutional stakeholders in support of students' development and future employment outcomes. An anonymised UK university case study demonstrates the models and principles in practice through a cross-institutional collaboration between the Careers Service, other student services teams, and academic departments. Universities, subject/programme teams, academics, careers services, extra-curricular programme teams, and teaching and learning professionals can use the principles and models in this article to create transferable skills taxonomies for their students that can be owned by all university stakeholders, and are relevant to the graduate workplace.

This article examines faculty motivation to integrate community engagement (CE) into teaching and research, in relation to faculty identity, rank and status, experience, and faith. Building upon previous research that focused on intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, our study also examined the role of an institutional definition of CE with clear criteria, as outlined by the Community Engagement Institutional Assessment (CEIA) rubric, in the motivational cycles of faculty reflection on current and aspirational aspects of CE. Surprisingly, our results illustrate that even when colleges and universities support CE across the institution, faculty may not be significantly motivated by this expressed valuing of CE. Importantly, our findings indicate that faculty would like to achieve the aspirational status on all criteria, pointing to the potential for the rubric to bridge the gap between institutional mission and individual faculty motivations. Enhancing this alignment may increase sustained and meaningful impact on the community.

In response to COVID-19, post-secondary institutions went through a widespread transition to online and remote learning to address the immediate effects of disruption in the teaching and learning environment. This study aims to map the changes and challenges in the areas of responses to students' psychological needs, responses to students' academic needs, and responses to minoritized students' needs from institutional leaders', teaching faculties', and teaching assistants' perspectives via a qualitative approach. The results suggest that institutional leaders and instructors perceived a decrease in academic motivation and increase in social isolation among students during COVID-19 especially from minoritized backgrounds. Implications and guidance on future university policies and programs to help preserve educational quality of instruction and mitigate educational inequities are discussed. [Note: The page range (1-24) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct page range is 18-41.]

Sustainability action at universities is complex and requires engaging multiple competences that reside on different levels outside and inside the organisation. In addition to individual competences, social communities also possess collective resources and characteristics that do not translate into a sum of individual abilities. Based on a qualitative small-n comparative study of four universities in Spain, Portugal, Finland and Romania, this paper explores the concept of collective sustainability competences as enablers and constraints of sustainability action at universities. Drawing from institutional theory and nestedness in organisations, the article poses the following research question: How can the collective sustainability competences of universities be conceptualised? The article develops a conceptual understanding of regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements of collective sustainability competences as a nested institutional space. In so doing, the article contributes to the discussion on the capacity of universities to act as key organisations in sustainability transitions.

In 2012, the Vietnamese government enacted the institutional autonomy policy to support the reform process of the higher education system. The autonomy policy signifies the transfer of decision-making authority from ministries to public universities to increase university performance and competitiveness in the globalized knowledge economy. This paper examines the nature of autonomy as a new form of governance in Vietnamese higher education through the lens of agency theory. I used thematic analysis to analyze policy documents released by the Vietnamese government between 1993 and 2021. The findings indicate autonomy means Vietnamese public universities have authority to make decisions on primary activities; yet they must be accountable for their decision-making and responsible for funding sources. The study contributes to the literature on comparative and international higher education by providing a better understanding of autonomy in a post-Soviet context and informing a transformative approach to policy practices for the higher education reform.

As a response to declining student results on certain academic measures, a great deal of government policy intervention in Australia and internationally has been directed towards correcting a perceived deficit in teachers. Such interventions deliberately ignore the possibility that other factors might also be impacting student learning. The study reported here employed Institutional ethnography (IE) to begin from the standpoint of students, across all secondary year groups, and trace the factors that students perceive influence their capacity to learn. The voices of these students provided new and surprising insights to teachers and to the school executive. Surprising in the sense that other large scale, institutionalised data collection methods had not revealed the factors considered important by students. The study demonstrated the efficacy of an IE approach to student voice in uncovering a broad range of student views.

Current literature outlines the importance of--and strategies for--collecting student life material in institutional archives but does not address the inclusion of this material within collecting statements. This study examines publicly available collecting statements from Association of Research Libraries (ARL) institutions' university archives, seeking mentions of student life archival material, diversity, and proactive approaches for collecting said material. Findings suggest that while many ARL institutions mention student life in these policies, most do not make the connection to how this material relates to diversity within the university archives, nor do they provide a proactive approach for collecting this material.

This paper examines the mechanisms through which higher education institutions (HEIs) explore, focusing on organizational status and institutional logic. We hypothesize that the exploration mechanisms differ depending on the public and private sectors. Revisiting middle-status conformity, we assert that the U-shaped relationship is stronger for private HEIs than public HEIs, as private HEIs are more concerned about status. We also argue that the congruence of institutional logics between HEIs and their funding partners foster exploration based on the sense of security. In contrast, when HEIs receive funding from partners with incongruent logics, they explore less because of their tendency to avoid additional uncertainty. We empirically test our hypotheses using data on US HEIs between 2014 and 2020. Our results demonstrate that a U-shaped relationship between status and exploration is stronger for private HEIs. Moreover, non-market funding providers, whose institutional logic congruent with public HEIs yet incongruent with private HEIs, increase the exploration of public HEIs and decrease the exploration of private HEIs. By integrating theories on organizational learning, status, and institutional theory, our study contributes to a nuanced understanding of the differences between public and private HEIs with respect to exploration.

Over the past decade, increasingly more colleges and universities have had to address student-initiated demands following racist incidents that occur both locally and nationally. However, the demands to address unfair conditions on campus do not necessarily result in meaningful change. To better understand how student activism facilitates administrative actions that lead to change and the extent to which social media accentuates activism, we examined student-initiated efforts to increase "diversity" at Yale University. Our study combined more than 100 documents with 5 years of social media data to identify key patterns that significantly contributed toward facilitating institutional change. The findings show that to facilitate administrative actions, student activists grew their reach, reiterated their demands over time, and activated the individuals and groups peripheral to the original demands. Their combined efforts were accentuated by the use of social media, which served to make their activism even more consequential for mediating tangible and demonstrable change at the institutional level.

As institutions, schools hold a place of significant value for their stakeholders. Selznick (1957/1984) recognised that institutions require a particular type of leadership that is concerned with the promotion and protection of values. Although not a new theory, institutional leadership has not received much attention by both researchers and practitioners since its formation, which has given way to the more familiar concepts of transactional and transformational leadership. A systematic literature review was carried out to survey what enactments of institutional leadership are taking place in different institutions and what impact Selznick's theories still have on leadership practice. A thematic analysis of the literature found institutional leaders acting in five areas: (1) managing institutional identity, (2) leading followers, (3) managing the external environment, (4) organisational management, and (5) management of the self. The findings could be useful to school leaders who seek to adopt a leadership style that ensures the survival of their institutions.

Football teams draw the largest crowds of any American collegiate sport, and with them, both positive and negative attention for colleges and universities. Nearly 50 colleges have added the sport recently, but little research has examined the institutional effects of adding a team. Some of these institutions are regional research universities adding the sport as part of broad plans to transform campus identities, while at smaller public and private institutions, adding a football team (with approximately 100 members) appears to be an attempt to boost racial diversity and the number of male students. This study uses difference-in-difference models to find that adding a football team appears to have a significant, but short-term, effect on enrollment and tuition revenue. The long-term effects of adding the sport do not appear to be statistically significant. This raises questions about the costs and benefits of adding football at a time when higher education faces significant challenges attracting students.

This article explores patterns in the US professoriate and the relationship to institutional wealth and status in public higher education, 2012-2021. We use latent profile analysis to identify different models for building a faculty and multinomial logistic regression to describe the characteristics of institutions employing these models. The results describe the human toll of the financial disruptions facing American public higher education. The findings suggest that changes to the faculty have been widespread but uneven.

For decades, educators and policy makers have decried low graduation rates at US colleges, advocating policies and making investments to improve graduation. We analyze a decade of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data for four-year colleges to investigate how much institutions have improved their graduation rates from 2008 through 2018, once controlling for institutional and student-body characteristics. We find substantial improvement to graduation rates at public colleges, modest improvement at private not-for-profits, and a decline in graduation at the for-profit sector. We then investigate whether improvements to graduate rates are associated with variation in student-body composition, selectivity, and institutional expenditures, using pooled cross-sectional, Prais-Winsten, and college fixed-effect models. We find that most between-college variation in graduation rates over time reflects variation in the composition of a college's student body and in instructional expenditures. Our Bending the Curve metric utilizes the cross-sectional models to calculate predicted graduation rates for each college and determines how much they exceeded or failed to meet expectations. Unadjusted graduation measures, such as IPEDS' rates that fail to adjust for these compositional factors, are poor indicators of institutional effectiveness and can mislead stakeholders who use them as an indicator of college performance.

Doctor of Education (EdD) faculty members play a critical role in contributing to the goals and objectives of their institutions. This case study explored EdD faculty member's contributions to the institution's goals and objectives. A comprehensive analysis of the students' assessments has identified several emerging themes. These themes highlighted how EdD faculty members demonstrate expertise and knowledge, contribute to research, provide mentorship and guidance, foster collaboration and community engagement, engage in service and leadership, promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, prioritize professional development and innovation, advocate for evidence-based practice, create a sense of community and belonging, instill a culture of lifelong learning, and serve as institutional ambassadors. Understanding and recognizing these themes is crucial for institutions to support and empower their EdD faculty members effectively. By implementing recommendations such as providing professional development opportunities, fostering collaboration, recognizing excellence, supporting mentorship and advising, promoting diversity and inclusion, encouraging research dissemination and engagement, nurturing a sense of community and belonging, and establishing feedback mechanisms, institutions can enhance the contributions of EdD faculty members to the overall success of their institutions and the field of education as a whole. Future research in this area could further explore the long-term impact of faculty contributions, conduct comparative analyses, examine student outcomes, explore faculty perspectives, investigate institutional support and resources, and explore the impact of collaborative partnerships.