Widening participation in higher education for under-represented groups is a priority internationally. In Australia, the most common entry pathway for domestic undergraduate students is by obtaining an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) in the final year of secondary school. The ATAR system, however, has been criticised as disadvantaging…

Science undergraduates' timely degree completion (TDC) has become increasingly important for students themselves, universities, and society, due to issues such as cost, efficiency, and productivity, respectively. This study investigated the potential effect of several variables on TDC of Bachelor of Science (BSc) students at an Australian…

In Australian higher education, there is a tension between international students' English language proficiency (ELP) seen as inadequate, thus prompting the need for firm gatekeeping for quality control, and on the other hand, the financial dependence on international student revenues, and therefore, striving to attract international applicants.…

This paper investigates admission procedures of Master of Arts programs of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (MA TEFL) in Iran in comparison with universities around the world. Along with a view of the centralised national MA TEFL entrance exam held in Iran during the past three decades, we investigated admission requirements for comparable…

Enabling education is an enactment of Australia's attempts to address inequity in higher education (HE), offering free, alternative pathways to students who do not enter through the 'traditional' school-university pathway. Each Australian enabling program is different in terms of size, design, curricula and length, meaning that there is…

Amid this global landscape for education and policy, this paper focuses on the subject of teacher quality through the lens of teacher education reform and one particular Australian policy initiative: The "Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education" (LANTITE). Introduced by the federal Australian government in 2016 as a…

Mass media provides a public space for its readers to enter the discussion on education, as they consume and interpret key messages, which are often shaped by key educational policies. With a suite of recent teacher education reform measures in Australia aimed at solving the "problem" with teacher quality, a conceptual map for conducting…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine whether Australian Islamic schools, by dint of their unique status within Australian private schooling, may be construed as elitist or exclusivist premised on markers such as religious affiliation, school age, history, location, reputation and non-curricular excellences such as affluence and alumni.…

University law schools have been beset with a sense of schizophrenia ever since first established in the 19th century. They were unsure as to whether they were free to teach and research in the same way as the humanities or whether they were constrained by the presuppositions of legal practice. More recently, this tension has been overshadowed by…

Transnational migration, especially the growth of forced migration is unsettling the literature on widening access to university education. Equity definitions and understandings that frame social inclusion have presumed stable domestic populations within nations and targeted redressing historic internal social inequalities. Refugees and people…

Tertiary institutions are experiencing an increased number of enrolments, with students varying in their demographics, previous education, and academic achievement. This relative increase in undergraduate enrolments in Australia has not translated to an increase in student retention or graduate numbers. This prompts the need to explore predictors…

The low Australian Tertiary Admissions Ranks (ATARs) of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) students are routinely highlighted in the media and in reviews of ITE, with the perception that such students will be unable to become effective teachers. As part of the NSW Government's "Great Teaching, Inspired Learning" (GTIL) Framework, minimum…

Universities are increasingly utilising social media for student recruitment, the most highly used channel for prospective students. However, research on information gathering and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM)-seeking behaviours on social media is generally absent. This paper explores the information sought by prospective students on social…

Under the third wave of international student mobility, Australia has become the third largest country receiving international students. Compared with the United States and the United Kingdom, Australia can still maintain a stable increase in terms of hosting Chinese students. For Australia, attracting international students becomes an important…

This research explores the potential of pedagogies embedded within an Australian example to allow pre-graduate diploma of education (PSDE) students to persist and succeed in their ambitions. This paper examines how the twin concepts of resilience, the capacity of an individual to withstand difficulties, and relational resilience, a capacity to…