Representations of higher education in fiction-based sources contribute to forming public perceptions of academia, and so are a form of public pedagogy. Within popular culture representations, understandings of academics are constructed using particular tropes which build shared meanings of the profession. Conferences are one of these tropes and…

While research reveals weaknesses in preparation-program curricula, there are challenges with these studies due to incomplete data from program directories. This descriptive study offers the results of an exhaustive search for programs in the United States and examines how each program's required curriculum aligns with field standards. Findings…

In thinking about their experiences as community college advocates, Erin Doran and Kayla Lucht found that they both came to community colleges as adjuncts to supplement their incomes--but that a deep admiration and love for their students kept them there. Like so many others in higher education, they fell into their roles as community college…

Wider visibility of information literacy (IL) outside of the library and information science (LIS) field is important to the success of IL instruction, learning, and research. The development and major updates of several information literacy documents in the past decade evidence the changing landscape of IL research, but how these changes have…

Size is the big unspoken problem in UK higher education. Small providers are stifled. Large universities enjoy oligopolistic advantage at the cost of agility. This damages institutional diversity and dynamism: the sector's ability to absorb new concepts, to grow and renew itself. For the first time, this report provides a full picture of small and…

As the number of articles on postsecondary topics expands, new methods are required to quantitatively understand the literature. Previous scholars looking at the higher education literature use manual coding, which limits the number of years that can be studied, or network analysis of citations and words, which does not yield groupings of articles…

Higher education, or more strictly higher education studies, is sometimes referred to as a discipline, though it is more often referred to as a field, sector or area for study. But what is a discipline and does higher education studies, at its current state of development, qualify as one? This article re-considers these matters and comes to some…

This article describes online writing sessions developed for a CPED Community College Leadership education doctorate EdD program at a research-intensive, land-grant university. Sessions were introduced during the summer of 2020 after the existing executive, face-to-face program shifted entirely to online delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The…

One way to support academics as whole people is to address the psychology of success and failure in academic work. Despite their success in securing doctorates and academic positions, academics often feel like imposters. The current neoliberal audit culture reinforces this sense by demanding more and more of them in terms of outputs that are…

Within the international higher education community there is not a system nor gold standard to identify the value of higher education institutions (HEIs). For the current research, the definition of value was determined through quantitative methods considering utility and cost. The research problem underscored the importance of valuing…

As the low-consensus field of higher education grows, it negotiates constraints and possibilities in the topics engaged and the scholars included. To trace the shifting patterns of research topics in higher education studies during the past 20 years, we examined networks of the topical structures of ASHE conference papers and a subset of U.S.…

Now more than ever, leading community colleges is a complicated and challenging endeavor. According to the American Council on Education's (ACE) American College President Study of 2017, 33.9% of community college presidents planned to retire from their positions within three to five years. Consequently, this gap in community college leadership…

Humanizing Higher Education was the 2022 conference theme for the Association for the Study of Higher Education. This presidential address takes a forward look back on higher education within a global context and in the aftermath of a global health pandemic, making an argument for the need to humanize higher education. The address offers a…

In this article, taken from the 2019 ASHE Presidential address, Kristen A. Renn argues that to stay relevant and also to influence the direction of postsecondary education, there must be engagement in the will to reimagine the study of higher education. She discusses the challenges and opportunities for the future bound up in the fact that higher…

How community colleges educate students is an ever-changing proposition, one marked by an increasing number of unfilled leadership positions and an operational landscape even more reliant on labor market outcomes, learning, equity and completion. A growing number of senior leaders approaching retirement has created a wealth of career opportunities…