This article traces the development of four narratives of financial assistance for Australian university students - to encourage excellence; to meet public need; to build the stock of human capital; and as universal provision - and their effect on the development of a fifth narrative, centred on the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS).…

Migrant academics' teaching, research and leadership knowledge and skills are essential and valued in their host higher education institutions, globally. However, there is limited evidence on understanding migrant academics' career capital experiences in Australian universities. Drawing on a career capital framework, this qualitative study…

This study explores perceived skill outcomes among graduates of 39 Australian higher education institutions in the short- to medium-term after course completion. While acknowledging important dimensions of graduate employability beyond the skills-based approach, we investigated graduate perspectives on their industry-relevant skill outcomes from…

This paper explores how students participating in a co-curricular scholarship programme in a large Australian university develop their employability. It seeks to add to recent literature regarding different approaches to graduate employability through examining how participating students' capital acquisition is shaped by and internalised within…

T his paper presents an assessment of suggestions in international research and media that the modern construction cadetship experience is exploitative and, on that basis, problematises the growing trend of work integrated learning (WIL) in the Australian construction industry. Field research, aligning with the methodologies of major studies in…

Outbound student mobility can be regarded as an important foreign policy initiative to exert and increase national influence in host locations. But how to evaluate the specific soft power influences remains unsolved. In this article, an educational soft power framework that can provide a reference in evaluating soft power of related education…

International higher education in many developed countries and more particularly in the United States and Australia has become a great source of revenue for their economies from students of the developing and underdeveloped countries (Least Development Countries). Money together with the mobility of international students from Least Development…

This article revisits the Mincer earnings function and presents comparable estimates of the average monetary returns associated with an additional year of education across different regions worldwide. In contrast to the traditional Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method commonly employed in the literature, this study applied a cutting-edge approach…

Purpose: This paper explores the economic and social effects of human capital investment in the 20th century. As well as drawing on census data and statistical yearbooks in Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the paper develops its argument by an intersection of scholarly work in sociology, economics and the history of education to consider the…

Study at a foreign university can be an important way of developing international human capital. We investigate factors affecting international student flows for higher education and their consequences for bilateral market integration in Australia. Estimation results demonstrate that income, cost competitiveness, migration network effects and…

This book explores new and distinctive forms of higher vocational education across the globe, and asks how the sector is changing in response to the demands of the 21st century. These new forms of education respond to two key policy concerns: an emphasis on high skills as a means to achieve economic competitiveness, and the promise of open access…

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link…

This article examines the long-run effect of higher education, measured in average years of tertiary schooling, on the level and growth rate of national per capita income. It uses an improved dataset on educational attainments which not only reduces measurement error but also overcomes data comparability issues and allows us to estimate the…

'Student success' is a key driver in higher education policy and funding. Institutions often adopt a particular lens of success, emphasising 'retention and completion', 'high grades', 'employability after graduation' discourses, which place high value on human capital or fiscal outcomes. We explored how students themselves articulated notions of…

Since the late 1970s, international education has steadily gained in popularity in China. An emerging middle class seeks to strengthen its position in China's rapidly stratifying society under its socialist market economy with the shift from wealth creation for all to wealth concentration for a few. Previously, a foreign qualification was…