Sessional academic staff form most of the teaching staff cohort in Australian universities. The available literature supports that this important staff cohort often experience precarious and insecure work, restricted access to training, support and development, and limited opportunities for career progression (compared to their colleagues in…

Through multilevel regression analysis, we examine the impact of managerialism, particularly accreditation practices, on the increasing job insecurity in universities. We find that universities that are accredited, private, secular or non-Catholic are more likely to offer insecure jobs, but that the relevance of these factors depends on each…

Internationally, changes to university funding arrangements have put pressure on the workloads of tenured academic staff and increased the reliance on casual academics to backfill teaching and research positions. Limited research has focused on the effects of casualisation on research academics and the institutions in which they work. This paper…

Temporary contracts are increasingly used in academia. This is a major concern for non-tenured researchers, since weak job security may hamper job satisfaction. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the role of academic tenure for job satisfaction of researchers in European countries. The work uses data from the MORE2 survey, a large-scale…

We study whether the completion of an optional professional year placement during undergraduate studies enhances job quality, in terms of earnings, job security and career fit, for economics graduates from a UK university. Using linear and discrete choice models, we estimate the effect of doing a professional year placement on four graduate…

Using data from a survey of all high-school graduates in a Swiss canton, we analyze the relationship between students' political orientation and their choice of a university major. Analyzing this question in the context of the Swiss higher education system adds to the existing literature because unlike students in other countries, Swiss students…