The history of education is, and can be, many things. In this article, I argue that the history of education in the Nordic countries is marked by three phases, based on its institutional setting. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the history of education was written by schoolmen for schoolmen. In the post-war era, the…

In the past few centuries, an accelerating process of legalization and classification have moulded the diverse range of earlier institutions into a limited number of isomorphic organizational forms. Today, institutions of higher education, with their roots in the corporate forms of medieval universities, can also have the legal status of, for…

Boards in higher education organizations (HEOs) play multiple roles. While they govern, boards are also expected to embed HEOs in society. Indeed, recent higher education reforms in Europe have emphasized the embedding role of HEO boards more than their governing role. But, although these reforms are widespread, we still know little about the ways…

This article studies a sample of displaced workers during the deep 1990s recession in Sweden and estimates the effect of secondary-level adult education on tertiary-level educational attainment. Plant closures and mass layoffs are used to identify job separations unrelated to individual productivity. Results indicate a large positive effect of…

Work-integrated Learning (WIL) seeks to bridge the gap between 'scholastic' training and work. This study explores the ironic fact that the WIL discourse remains formed by the idea of "academia" and the "real world," an idea that in decisive ways creates this gap. A genealogical discourse analysis of how this idea operates in…

The aim of this article is to illuminate and discuss evaluation and evaluation systems in relation to the pace of change. It is argued that evaluation promotes and accelerates change. The article will thus contribute to a critical scrutiny of evaluation as a societal phenomenon and as a widespread practice in education. To accomplish this aim, the…

Political reforms of the 1990s ushered in sweeping socio-economic changes in the Nordic countries, including radical changes in their vocational education and training systems. However, the reforms led to a school-based vocational education and training system with a strong orientation towards higher education in Sweden, and a hybrid system with a…

In this article, we address the questions: How is the purpose of higher education constructed within policy texts from the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), England and Sweden? How does this position students in making the transition from Bachelor to Masters? We do this through analysis of two recent policy documents from each of the EHEA,…

This article examines the long-run effect of higher education, measured in average years of tertiary schooling, on the level and growth rate of national per capita income. It uses an improved dataset on educational attainments which not only reduces measurement error but also overcomes data comparability issues and allows us to estimate the…

Since the mid-twentieth century, higher education has been subject to spectacular growth. While the expansion of higher education is undoubtedly a general trend, its actual characteristics in terms of its specific conditions and driving forces vary by context. In this article, our aim is to develop such a socio-political historical narrative of…

This paper investigates the emergence of an engineering education research (EER) community in three Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland and Sweden. First, an overview of the current state of Nordic EER authorship is produced through statistics on international publication. Then, the history of EER and its precursor activities is described in three…

This study examines how Swedish students originating from metropolitan areas have used university colleges to access higher education. In the 1970s, as part of a series of reforms to the Swedish higher education system, university colleges were established. One reason being to make higher education more accessible to students outside the…

This article describes the development of the Swedish curriculum-theory tradition with a focus on different curriculum practices, educational message systems, arenas, and curriculum makers. Attention has been paid to different places, spaces, and times in relation to the selection, ordering, and manifestation of knowledge, norms, and values, as…

As universities seek to become more international, their need to engage with a wider range of languages, particularly English, seems more prominent. At the same time, universities are also regarded by many stakeholders as key institutions to preserve a given national language and culture. This apparent tension makes universities a fruitful ground…

The focus of this article is on changes of epistemic content in evaluating and controlling teaching at universities. Methodologically, in this study, we integrate macro-historical-political configurations with contemporary micro-social situations in contrast to a discursive-philosophical orientation. We strive for integration between historical…