Size is the big unspoken problem in UK higher education. Small providers are stifled. Large universities enjoy oligopolistic advantage at the cost of agility. This damages institutional diversity and dynamism: the sector's ability to absorb new concepts, to grow and renew itself. For the first time, this report provides a full picture of small and…

As the number of articles on postsecondary topics expands, new methods are required to quantitatively understand the literature. Previous scholars looking at the higher education literature use manual coding, which limits the number of years that can be studied, or network analysis of citations and words, which does not yield groupings of articles…

Higher education, or more strictly higher education studies, is sometimes referred to as a discipline, though it is more often referred to as a field, sector or area for study. But what is a discipline and does higher education studies, at its current state of development, qualify as one? This article re-considers these matters and comes to some…

World-wide responses to the global pandemic, such as travel restrictions, border closures and lockdowns, have posed new challenges to researchers. For qualitative researchers conducting fieldwork, gathering data in person can be inapplicable (Howlett, 2021). My research investigates English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pre-service teachers' beliefs…

In the last decade, commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become more accessible for use in civil roles such as scientific research. Despite their increasing use in research, there has been little investigation of their potential use as an educational tool in Geoscience. This small-scale mixed methods research investigated the potential…

Happenstance learning theory posits that unexpected events can have lasting positive impacts on individual learning and development. In this reflection, a U.S. doctoral student shares how an unexpected opportunity occurred to participate in a cultural immersion experience in Ghana, West Africa. Along with learning outcomes that resulted,…

This article describes online writing sessions developed for a CPED Community College Leadership education doctorate EdD program at a research-intensive, land-grant university. Sessions were introduced during the summer of 2020 after the existing executive, face-to-face program shifted entirely to online delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The…

One way to support academics as whole people is to address the psychology of success and failure in academic work. Despite their success in securing doctorates and academic positions, academics often feel like imposters. The current neoliberal audit culture reinforces this sense by demanding more and more of them in terms of outputs that are…

Within the international higher education community there is not a system nor gold standard to identify the value of higher education institutions (HEIs). For the current research, the definition of value was determined through quantitative methods considering utility and cost. The research problem underscored the importance of valuing…

The challenges of conducting lengthy fieldwork in today's busy academic world have impacted the types of research that are able to be carried out. In particular, traditional educational ethnography has become problematic for research beyond initial doctoral research programs. This article analyzes data collected during a return to the field of a…

As the low-consensus field of higher education grows, it negotiates constraints and possibilities in the topics engaged and the scholars included. To trace the shifting patterns of research topics in higher education studies during the past 20 years, we examined networks of the topical structures of ASHE conference papers and a subset of U.S.…

Now more than ever, leading community colleges is a complicated and challenging endeavor. According to the American Council on Education's (ACE) American College President Study of 2017, 33.9% of community college presidents planned to retire from their positions within three to five years. Consequently, this gap in community college leadership…

This article explores the role of drawing as a tool for reflection. It reports on a PhD research project that aims to identify and analyse the value that co-design processes can bring to participants and their communities. The research is associated with Leapfrog, a three-year project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).…

This article describes the experiences of two doctoral students immersed in the process of learning ethnographic research. Through the use of a composite narrative of our experiences observing the culture at a division one university baseball complex, we contribute to the literature by sharing our perspectives as ethnographers-in-progress. We…

In this article, taken from the 2019 ASHE Presidential address, Kristen A. Renn argues that to stay relevant and also to influence the direction of postsecondary education, there must be engagement in the will to reimagine the study of higher education. She discusses the challenges and opportunities for the future bound up in the fact that higher…