In response to global competition in higher education, university rankings have been developed. These have been interpreted as indicating the regions and countries with the most prestigious and competitive higher education institutions. The rankings are viewed as important in many countries, but their role is ambiguous and contested in the Nordic…

Studies of global university rankings often assume that rankings as Anglo-American policy scripts have an increasing influence resulting in a convergence of policies and practices, or that the ideas of rankings continue to diverge into national types. In this article, we take a middle ground by arguing that when an idea of ranking is grounded in a…

Self-regulation in the governance of higher education systems is often assumed to improve institutional performance, accountability, and responsiveness. Although studies of higher education governance have addressed the extent of self-regulation across national systems, there has been less investigation of the links between self-regulation and…

With nearly half the states having authorized community colleges to award baccalaureate degrees, the community college baccalaureate (CCB) has become an increasingly common feature of the landscape of American higher education. While there has been an expansion of research on the CCB in recent years, the research to date consists mainly of studies…

Purpose: Doctoral students' ill-being in terms of stress, exhaustion and high levels of mental health problems has been well documented. Yet, the well-being of doctoral students is more than the absence of these negative symptoms. The number of studies exploring the combination of positive and negative attributes of doctoral students' well-being…

This article presents a co-constructive narrative inquiry into the subjectivities of three female graduate student researchers (GSRs) from China, Vietnam, and Finland pursuing academic career paths in comparative and international education (CIE). Two American teacher researchers and their GSRs came to this research committed to collaborative…

The knowledge of local culture is essential to establish competitive strategies in higher education. The objective of this research was to identify the organizational differences among three universities with different international contexts and satisfaction level. An approach was made regarding Relational Coordination (RC) attributes: accurate,…

In the past few centuries, an accelerating process of legalization and classification have moulded the diverse range of earlier institutions into a limited number of isomorphic organizational forms. Today, institutions of higher education, with their roots in the corporate forms of medieval universities, can also have the legal status of, for…

The purpose of this study was to examine variation in doctoral students' experiences of ethics in doctoral supervision and how these experiences are related to research engagement, burnout, satisfaction, and intending to discontinue PhD studies. Data were collected from 860 doctoral students in Finland, Estonia, and South Africa. Four distinct…

England has a 'pre-qualification' system of higher education admissions, where applications and offers are made to young people before exam results are received. While in most cases offers are conditional on achieving a grade target in A Level exams, recent years have seen an exponential growth in 'unconditional offers', where the offer of a place…

Higher education helps learners acquire the knowledge and skills they need to lead productive working lives, and it sparks the innovation that fosters economic growth and social progress. However, creating higher education systems that operate at a high level of research and teaching quality, with responsiveness to social and labour market…

Many universities in non-English speaking countries have been adopting English as a medium of instruction to internationalize their education. We set out to compare the language policies of a Finnish and a Japanese university using the lens of language ideology -- a set of normative beliefs about the social dimension of language. Data were…

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…

This article aims to investigate whether national differences in the institutionalization of the binary divide between universities and Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) lead to different outcomes in performing Academics' Societal Engagement (ASE). Two institutional theory-based core differences of European binary higher education (HE)…

The future engineer is labelled an entrepreneurial engineer, having networking, teamwork, opportunity recognition, creativity, risk management, and discipline-specific skills. Therefore, entrepreneurship education is being increasingly introduced in engineering education. The various educational designs used to introduce entrepreneurship education…