Seeing that the culture and governance of competition determines relations among social actors, we turn to the concept of referentiality to investigate the institutional order of competition in higher education. Defining referentiality as the description of a model standard for comparison, this study explores how higher education organizations…

The extant literature on the use of social media marketing for recruiting higher education students has an unstructured nature. To address this gap, this paper introduces a novel method called 'algorithmic document sequencing' (ADS) that links the key findings of 43 relevant articles procured from all databases to one another on the use of social…

Three influential theories are used to understand why employers value and seek out educational credentials in hiring. Qualifications can function as proof of productive skills (Human Capital Theory), as a signal of desirable characteristics (Signalling and Screening theories) or as a means for social closure (Closure Theory). Although these…

Veterans are a growing student population in institutions of higher education in the U.S., and universities adopt a variety of marketing efforts to recruit them. With a focus on university marketing messages as a targeted and public way for universities to attract student veterans, the current study examines how student veterans are framed and…

Most studies of academic inbreeding have focused on assessing its impact on scholarly practices, outputs, and outcomes. Few studies have concentrated on the other possible effects of academic inbreeding. This paper draws on a large number of studies on academic inbreeding to explore how the practice has been conceptualized, how it has emerged, and…

Competition today has become a central policy imperative in higher education. Connected to resource efficiency and scarcity, it remains closely attached to the idea of the market but reaches beyond when related to positional or status orders. In the higher education literature such varieties of competition -- as distinct social processes -- are…

The purpose of this Action Research study was to examine and improve the recruitment and onboarding of members of the Board of Trustees. To accomplish this, Cycle 1 of research included semi-structured interviews with 11 individuals who serve as current or former members of the Board of Trustees at Excaliber College as well as key members of the…

While kinesiology as a field and as an academic major has evolved and diversified considerably over the last several decades, the cultural and racial demographics of kinesiology majors has remained fairly similar to the demographic characteristics of the early 2000s and before. There is incongruence between the actual diversity of the American…

This paper aims to explain the unsuccessful relationship between the awareness of prominent international education brands and enrollment intention. A serial mediation model encompassing perceived congruity and brand attitude was developed and was tested using the Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique involving 132…

The discourse of the internationalisation of higher education continues to grow in influence. Whilst the bulk of the IHE literature has been Northern-focused and dominated, there was an African strand a decade or so ago that has sought to understand what the discourse means in African contexts, shaped profoundly as they have been by colonialism.…

This paper presents the first systematic investigation into the search engine optimization practices of major contract cheating websites in the United States. From a business perspective, visibility in organic search engine results is considered one of the top client recruitment tools. The current understanding of student recruitment strategies by…

This paper presents the results of qualitative research on academic inbreeding in Czech higher education, the first of its kind. Its focus is on exploring the significance of academic inbreeding, its types, practices, and possible solutions. The research for this paper was done among academic staff at eight institutions of higher education in the…

We analyze the role of institutional founding conditions and institutional legacy for universities' self-representation in terms of diversity. Based on 374 universities located in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland, we can differentiate between a more idealistic understanding (logic of inclusion and equality) and a…

New marketing strategies, new perspectives, and new trends have emerged significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many higher education institutions are challenged to adapt to these rapid changes as well as to choose the right marketing approaches. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore the COVID-19 impact on marketing for Higher…

India, traditionally one of the largest exporters of mobile students, has adopted wide-ranging policies to attract more international students. This research draws on a secondary analysis of published international student mobility (ISM) statistics for the 2012 to 2021 timeline and a text-based examination of Indian higher education (HE) policy…