Since the mid-1990s, the pressure of globalization and the pressing demands of a knowledge economy led to a series of educational reforms. The focus of these was the promotion of quality education and massification of higher education. After the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the governments in different parts of Asia have implemented…

The Latin American tertiary education (TE) sector is nowadays facing demands from globalisation and a knowledge-based society, while still dealing with challenges in terms of access, equity, quality and relevance. This new context has prompted a greater demand for TE and is forcing institutions to reconsider their mission, tasks and…

The past decade or so has witnessed a large-scale reform of the Chinese national college entrance exam (the gaokao) system, which nonetheless has been trapped within a dilemma of balancing diversification and equality. Specifically speaking, the reform needs to reconcile the clash between adopting diverse and holistic college admissions to fix the…

Since the late 1990s, many European countries have adapted their traditional one-cycle curriculum structure in higher education to the two-cycle structure employed in the Anglo-American world. In the large social science literature dealing with this reform phenomenon, the Bologna Process -- starting with the 1999 Declaration of Bologna -- is…

The 1988 University Autonomy Act conferred Portuguese universities with a considerable degree of autonomy and designed a governance system based on collegiality. Strong participation of academic and non-academic staffs and students in decisions became the rule and democratic elections of all individual or collective governance bodies were the…

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some of the dominant empirical and conceptual themes in the area of graduate employment and employability over the past decade. The paper considers the wider context of higher education (HE) and labour market change, and the policy thinking towards graduate employability. It draws upon various…

The higher education (HE) subsystem in Ethiopia has passed through a series of policy reforms in the last 10 years. Key reform areas ranged from improving quality and relevance of programmes to promoting equality in access to and success in HE. Despite the effort underway, gender inequality has remained a critical challenge in the subsystem. This…

One of the main aims of the so-called common "European Higher Education Area" is the creation of a European framework for higher education (HE) qualifications and a network of "quality assurance agencies." In the light of the above processes, recent legislation in Greece on quality assurance in HE and the operation and…

Drawing from a seminal article by Burton Clark that appeared in 2004 in "Higher Education Policy," this paper examines the influence of organization studies in higher education policy research over the last 25 years and highlights the potential contributions for future inquiry. It argues that analysis has mainly tackled policy reforms…

In East Africa, no other country has witnessed as great a surge in university institutions as Kenya. The intent of this paper is to explore the persistence of the ethnic configurations in the surge of higher education in Kenya, within the context of the country's history. Outlining the major flashpoints in the country's history will be…

In 2009, the Finnish parliament passed a new Universities Act that aimed to strengthen the institutional autonomy of the country's universities. But why and how did the idea of autonomy come to frame the reform agenda in the overt way it did? In analysing a sample of authoritative policy and strategy papers by the key stakeholders in the higher…

In recent decades, the revolutionary expansion of Chinese universities has emerged as one of the most significant phenomena in the worldwide transformation of higher education. Since 2003, China has become a country with the largest national higher education system in the world, with nearly 31 million students in 2010. What have students'…

Narrative policy analysis is examined for its contribution to participatory policy development within higher education. Within narrative policy analysis the meta-narrative is developed by the policy analyst in order to find a way to bridge opposing narratives. This development can be combined with participants deliberating in a policy process,…

In the context of neoliberal government policymaking in the UK, universities have become increasingly managerial in their approach. Growing market pressures and a commodification of higher education (HE) has had a significant effect on the work of academics, as producers and providers of HE. Human Resource Management -- a management tool that…

During the past 30 years, teacher training in Israel has undergone a revolution: the teaching profession has become academic, and since the mid-1980s all teachers were required to attend either an academic college of education or a university in order to acquire a bachelor's degree and a teacher's license. Yet, despite this process of…