In this article we examine the European Semester as an innovative form of policy coordination, with distinct effects on education and skills policies for Member States. We analyse the Semester's framing of education policy, and examine its manifestations in Spain and Sweden, two countries considered to be different in their approach to education.…

The mobility of international students is a crucial tool for the European Union's goal of creating a unified European Higher Education Area. Despite the initial assumption that all European universities and students can benefit equally from cross-university study experiences, certain European regions have become disproportionately favored over…

Purpose: The internationalization of higher education institutions (HEIs) is the top stage of international relations among universities, and it is no longer regarded as a goal but as a means to improve the education of sustainability. As institutional commitments to internationalize higher education continue to grow, so does the need to…

Sino-foreign cooperative education, a cornerstone of China's international higher education collaborations, plays a pioneering role in its higher education reforms. This mode not only offers a bridge to global education markets but also shapes the trajectory of higher educational reform. The research presented here aims to improve the…

Context: International comparative research on Vocational Education and Training (VET) is gaining importance, as global cooperation and mutual learning in VET grows. However, it is characterized by a high degree of complexity, due on one hand, to the heterogeneity of the VET sector, and on the other hand to the unique challenges of international…

In the last three decades, a networked global system has emerged in the natural-science-based disciplines, sustained by collegial epistemic relations in universities. Nationally ordered and funded science has expanded alongside the global science system. The common global pool of papers, defined by bibliometric collections, nevertheless excludes…

This study focuses on the state and effectiveness of national funding systems of Higher Education to support the European Universities Initiative. Its focus lies on the mechanisms employed by Member States for the core funding of higher education institutions, in particular the mechanisms that include performance elements. More specifically, the…

The paper presents a scoping review of research on transnational education in China published from 2016, the last year that a comprehensive literature review on the subject was published in "Chinese Education & Society." The authors delimited a corpus of 88 articles focusing on collaborative transnational education in China and…

In times of globalisation of higher education, alternative theoretical and methodological approaches were introduced in the field of comparative higher education research. To stimulate the debate on this issue, this paper firstly addresses them theoretically by combining the concept of institutional isomorphism and the 'glonacal' analytical…

Studies of regionalism -- intra and comparative regionalism -- have often used the European experience to explain the emergence and evolution of regionalisms in other parts of the world. This tendency in approaching the European experience as explanatory has permeated sector-specific developments. In this article, we consider the developments in…

Through the lens of paradox theory, we present and discuss the cases of two different proposals for a European public university, located in Lisbon, Portugal, to develop transnational campuses, one in China and one in Egypt. We discuss the three overarching goals of the transnational campus in our cases (funding through international cooperation,…

The Republic of Moldova is located in a tense geopolitical environment between the European Union (EU) and the Russian Federation. As the EU and Russia have incorporated higher education in their foreign policy agendas, this article analyses (1) whether the higher education policies of the EU and Russia are in competition in Moldova and (2) how…

Europe is, in many ways, of central importance to discussions about higher education. Various European initiatives, such as the Bologna Process and the Erasmus mobility programme, have had a direct and material impact on the shape and nature of higher education across the continent. They have also been linked to wider political objectives, such as…

This volume addresses the conceptions of actors and actorhood in higher education research. It explores the range of actors that are (or should be) recognized and theorized in higher education research, the processes that shape actorhood in the higher education reforms and explores the relations between the actors and higher education reforms.…

During the past two decades, a shared set of norms and ideas on doctoral education and its purposes has emerged. As the EU strives to transform itself into a knowledge society, countries are expected to have more doctorate holders and orient doctoral education towards the non-academic labour market. However, the interaction between the changes on…