Amid debates about the role and impact of global university rankings (GURs), very few have closely examined how GURs media outlets construct meanings of higher education (HE) in their visual representations. We critically examine publicly available visual media of students in the "Times Higher Education World University Rankings" and…

The delivery of online university courses has continued to grow for more than a decade. New advances in technology have made the efficient delivery of courses possible, as well as increasing the collections of tools for students to cheat. Cheating results in the atrophy of the student's academic integrity, it has the potential to damage a…

Special educational needs (SEN) can be seen as a 'construction' that countries define within their legislation and go on to identify, assess, and make provision for in different ways. Definitions vary widely from country to country and even within a country. Many governments have policies to ensure students with SEN are included in mainstream…

University rankings widely affect the behaviours of prospective students and their families, university executive leaders, academic faculty, governments and investors in higher education. Yet the social science foundations of global rankings receive little scrutiny. Rankings that simply recycle reputation without any necessary connection to real…

In 2014, Jonathan Zimmerman published an op-ed in the "Christian Science Monitor" in which he wrote, "The last time I checked, [men] held most of the important positions of power and influence in American society. And yet, college admissions offices lower the standard for young men--effectively raising it for women--simply to make…

The authors examined factors that affected the size of the freshman class at small liberal arts colleges after a decline of ten percent or more. Although top ranked national schools needed to do little, lesser ranked ones enjoyed a greater degree of recovery by offering larger amounts of financial aid and regional schools by awarding aid to more…

Higher education (HE) is a global enterprise. Its success (or failure) is integral to and a powerful indicator of the knowledge-producing and talent-attracting capacity of nations. But, the landscape in which HE operates today has become extremely complex; there are many more demands and many constituencies, each with an impact on and a voice in…

Higher education and innovation policies are today seen as central elements in national economic competitiveness, increasingly measured by global rankings. The book analyses the evolution of indicator-based global knowledge governance, where various national attributes have been evaluated under international comparative assessment. Reflecting this…

World university ranking systems used the weight-and-sum approach to combined indicator scores into overall scores on which the universities are then ranked. This approach assumes that the indicators all independently contribute to the overall score in the specified proportions. In reality, this assumption is doubtful as the indicators tend to…

Employability has become one of the most important outcomes of higher education despite it being weakly conceptualised for the sector. The lack of an accepted conceptualisation to address students' and graduates' employability results in difficulties when comparing research findings and therefore in assessing quality in higher education provision.…

This article presents an argument for re-reading Jean Baudrillard's ideas considering their potential contribution to the sociology of higher education, particularly in relation to contemporary debates about "world-class" universities. In order to apply Baudrillard's ideas, China's commitment to the development of "world-class"…

This study assesses the extent and nature of open access scholarly publishing in Brazil, one of the world's leaders in providing universal access to its research and scholarship. It utilizes Brazil's Qualis journal evaluation system, along with other relevant data bases to address the association between scholarly quality and open access in the…

College rankings have become a ubiquitous part of American higher education. As the popularity of rankings has increased, so have the number of research studies attempting to better understand the impact rankings have on college/university admissions outcomes. In the past, these studies have focused almost exclusively on elite national…

The aim of this research is to determine classification in which the level of accuracy in Turkish universities rankings is detected by the international assessments according to the independent variables PhD students ratio, the number of students per faculty member and the article scores. The data of research were obtained from University Ranking…

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector's emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the…