The need for universities to effectively support students identifying as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Colour (BIPoC) remains a pressing element of strategies to close awarding gaps. Within overall support packages, the contribution of Learning Developers merits investigation, since these staff are often responsible for nurturing growth in…

The sustainability of the student affairs profession continues to be questioned, as is the conditions influencing attrition and "burnout" of those working in the student affairs profession over time. Therefore, understanding the workplace conditions of midlevel student affairs administrators continues to be an important area of inquiry…

Although the number of international students in Canadian colleges has been increasing rapidly, colleges' internationalization activities have received less attention than those of universities. This article examined how Canadian colleges discuss international students in their official internationalization strategy documents. Conducting critical…

The aim of this study is to explore the functions that professional networks could have as sense givers during the process in which professional support staff at higher education institutions make sense of their roles. The empirical data comprise interviews with three categories of support staff at three technical universities in Sweden and a…

The study aims to explore the practice of continuous assessment (CA) and associated challenges of implementation in higher education institutions located in Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia. Drawing on assessment for learning and institutional theory, the qualitative multi-case design includes informants from three public universities.…

Amid growing concerns about social mobility in Britain's higher education system, our study delves into universities' role in addressing the social gap within the financial and professional services sectors. The social reproduction theory underscores how upper-class students often benefit from greater exposure to dominant cultural and educational…

This qualitative study was designed to explore the experiences of students and student services staff involved in the direct exchange program between University of Central Missouri (UCM) and Orebro University. The researcher explored the impact of student services staff assistance on students participating in this direct exchange. The conceptual…

Universities may have coped with the COVID-19 pandemic, but we argue there are still important lessons to be learnt from that experience of coping. In this paper, we explore whether universities could improve what they do, rather than just returning to pre-lockdown ways of working. We do this by analyzing a series of interviews with staff,…

Most first-year university students experience serious academic and adjustment challenges, which remain undetected until it is too late to provide meaningful intervention. Universities are therefore developing academic support systems that can assist in identifying students who experience learning challenges early on, and provide quality…

Informal partnerships between divisions of academic and student affairs units are common practice on many university campuses. History and traditions are rich at institutions, and individuals often assume successful programs and services between divisions of academic and student affairs will always continue; however, there is no guarantee because…

Universities in South Africa seem to be struggling to create inclusive conditions for black students to succeed in their studies. The persistence of inequality in universities could be partly blamed on the use of the term 'historically disadvantaged', which is not defined in policy documents, and this has resulted in universities being unclear on…

Do the narratives of employability constructed by higher education institutions for marketing purposes differ from the conceptualisation and/or the realisation of employability within those institutions? The study reported here drew on interviews with 16 senior academic and student support staff who were tasked with developing student…

The outbreak of COVID-19 and the lockdown measures that were widely implemented in response to the pandemic forced many of the forms of engagement and activities promoted by student affairs and services staff among students at universities to be curtailed or transformed -- at first, so that they entailed no interpersonal contact and later so that…

In its earliest form, Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) focused on recruiting students, but soon included a focus on student success, defined in terms of retention and graduation. Several researchers have noted that developing effective student services, as well as establishing strong lines of communications across departments, are key…

Discussed in this article are the different governance models in international student services in Canadian and Chinese universities. Informing this study were 39 international student service providers from 38 top Chinese universities while interacting with their Canadian counterparts in a professional development program in Canada. The derived…