The article addresses the issues surrounding the importance and impact of 'hinterlands' in the construction of European higher education systems and in the formation of sectoral policy. It draws on studies of Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom to illustrate different policy approaches and shows how in some countries…

Teacher shortages have intensified across several OECD countries, making this an urgent priority for education systems. Between 2015 and 2022, the share of students whose principals reported shortages rose from 29% to 46.7% on average across the OECD. Simultaneously, rapid technological advances, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and broader…

Interest in higher education institutions (HEIs) as instruments for development has increased in recent years. The main objective of this paper is to address the contribution of HEIs to development through their missions, models, and challenges. With this purpose, we perform a historical analysis and characterise higher-education systems through…

This paper analyses the inbreeding phenomena in Portuguese public universities. Inbreeding is defined as the recruitment of academics by the same institution that awarded their PhDs. Focusing on 1,217 PhD-holding Portuguese academics, belonging to four public universities and to six disciplinary areas, inbreeding is analysed in order to understand…

This paper provides an analysis of the potential impact of changes in recruitment and hiring processes in Portuguese higher education institutions--under the New Public Management framework--on the representation of women in academia. Based on official data from the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, two major…

In a context of increasing competition for students, admission conditions have been used as an instrument in a strategy of differentiation. Such a strategy is guided by short-run concerns, that is, the immediate need to attract more students. This article takes a longer term view, by examining graduates' employability. The authors find that…

This article analyses the impact of competitive arenas on schools' logics of action in six local European contexts (London, Paris, Lille, Charleroi, Budapest and Lisbon). It first examines how competitive processes affect different schools' activities (recruitment, provision of options, promotion, tracking, provision for children with special…

This paper characterizes and evaluates the student allocation in the Portuguese public higher education system. It describes the supply and demand sides of the system by looking at the "numerus clausus" across areas of study and institutions, institutions' degree of diversity, and performance and adjustment indicators based on students'…

The emergence of the market as a regulatory tool for the public sector and the promotion of competition among institutions are based upon the idea that they promote institutions' responsiveness to society and a more efficient use of public funds. However, autonomous institutions forced to compete under market-like conditions may follow strategies…