This paper explores the way in which elite students from Germany and Romania understand the role of talent, effort, and structural factors in shaping educational success and failure. The image of a successful student aligns with the requirements of the selection processes, with Romanian students emphasising effort, and German students projecting…

This study evaluates the influence of ranking reports on university brands' credibility and perceived differentiation. Signaling theory is applied to link ranking with credibility and perceived differentiation. An experimental approach was used to collect data and to test the hypothesis. Data was collected from 328 participants in the UK regarding…

Academic motivation enables students to face challenges in their studies and is important for student performance. Academic self-concept refers to students' perceptions of their competencies and ability to learn. The goal of the study was to evaluate academic motivation and self-concept of undergraduate optometry students. We used a mixed methods…

This research conducted a combined bibliometric and scholastic analysis for characterizing and assessing rectors' academic performance and scholarly impact at public universities in Indonesia. This bibliometric study evaluated the academic performance of 82 rectors of public universities in Indonesia from 93 initial candidates, focusing on 2706…

In the post-Apartheid era South Africa's universities have faced serious questions about the quality of their student learning in the face of near impossible challenges. The University of Cape Town, widely seen as the country's leading higher education institution, has shown remarkable resilience, however, in the range of initiatives it has…

Colleges and universities face pressure to maintain enrollments in a time of demographic shifts in the college-going population and reductions in state funding. One indicator of successfully maintaining enrollments is the percentage of accepted students who matriculate--the enrollment yield. Factors known to contribute to yield include school…

This paper investigates the effect of university prestige stratification on scholars' career achievements. We focus on 766 STEM PhD graduates hired by Mexican universities between 1992 and 2016. We rank university according to their prestige based on the pairwise assessment of quality contained in the PhD hiring networks. Further, we use a…

Competitive pressures can dilute the denominational identity of religiously affiliated colleges as colleges shed denominational bonds in pursuit of academic prestige. We ask: What is the relationship between denominational identity and athletic success at contemporary Christian colleges? To answer, we combine data from the Council for Christian…

Science and Engineering education are jewels of higher education. In India, among the pioneers of premium technical institutes, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are structurally designed to deliver global knowledge capital with a state-of-the-art curriculum and rigorous standards. Their capability to positively impact the global scale is…

When seeking to explain the eventual outcomes of a higher education experience, do the personal attributes and background factors students bring to college matter more than what the college is able to contribute to the development of the student through education or other institutional factors? Most education studies tend to simply ignore…

College presidents are receiving heightened public attention and scrutiny, but few data exist that demonstrate which college presidents are most effective at improving student outcomes. This report ranks over 400 current and former college and university presidents on how much they improved access, affordability, and student success during their…

This study presents the formulation of a quantitative and qualitative index of quality for accredited institutions based on their performance in five components related to institutional quality: research, students' performance, dropout rates, employability, and accreditation. This index will allow each accredited institution to identify its…

In this article, we examine conceptualisations of luck evoked by a select group of elite students studying in Oxbridge, when accounting for their academic success. The emphasis on luck in their narratives is categorised into three themes. The students linked their luckiness to deservedness, used luck as a way to express humbleness, and attributed…

This article extends a line of research on intentional change at public metropolitan research universities that aims to improve undergraduate student success (as measured by graduation and retention rates) while improving access (as measured by Pell and minority rates). Some of the issues that have emerged from this line of research involve the…

Studies on the cyclicality of higher education examine the relationship between variations in labor market conditions and changes in enrollment. While the majority of the existing literature implicitly assumes an elastic supply of enrollment, this study identifies institutions with supply constraints and investigates how those constraints have…