A dominant narrative exists that all regional public universities (RPUs) are striving for prestige and, if given the chance, would readily abandon their missions of facilitating educational access for marginalized students and increase admissions selectivity to privilege elite students. As a result of this dominant narrative, RPUs are largely…

While academic capitalism pervades many facets of US higher education, this study analyzes paid adwords as a method of academic capitalism in the online marketplace. This article presents findings from a five-month quantitative analysis of paid adwords of the 2018 top "US News & World Report" top 100 national universities. Capturing…

Many regional public universities (RPUs) provide college access to diverse groups of undergraduate students and face pressures to pursue prestige in the academic hierarchy. Prior research posits that RPUs will strive for prestige because of status- and resource-based rewards that flow from increasing their admissions selectivity,…

The current exploratory study determined the prevalence of the sport management academic degree being offered in top-ranked institutions as based on "U.S. News & World Report" rankings. A focus on the differences of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees being offered, or not offered, was placed on national universities and…

Purpose: This paper aims to analyse the relationship between two measures of university quality, the outcome and other characteristics of a mandatory accreditation and the university position in the national ranking. Design/methodology/approach: Natural language processing (NLP) models are used to calculate the sentiment indicators for 1,850…

Conventional wisdom suggests that a field of striving compels US public master's institutions (PMIs) to pursue prestige in the academic hierarchy. We posit that, due to their unique histories of democratizing college opportunity, PMIs face conflicting imperatives from two fields: an origin one of equity and another of striving. Our hypotheses are…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of studies on antecedents of the corporate reputation of higher education institutions (HEIs) from the perspectives of employees. Design/methodology/approach: The approach is an examination of previous literature on antecedents of corporate reputation in HEIs, published between…

This study explores how organizational identity is linked with organizational behavior and change at U.S. colleges and universities. Using IPEDS data from 914 public and private not-for-profit four-year institutions, this study analyzes how institutions' identity claims through their self-identified comparison groups are associated with Carnegie…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to extend existing research on stakeholder orientation (SO) on higher education institutions (HEIs) by segmenting Spanish public universities based on their perceived levels of SO and describing the profiles of the different segments identified. Given that being stakeholder-oriented, as well as being…

This paper is mainly about the digital reputation of universities, the correlation between the productivity of the universities and the reputation of the knowledge produced in the universities. Paper starts with the affect of social media and other web 2.0 entities on the universities and education. In the second part the difficulty of measuring…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of Malaysian public universities' service quality on international student satisfaction, institutional image and loyalty. Design/methodology/approach: A total number of 400 questionnaires were distributed to international students, selected using convenience sampling technique, at…

This study examined the effect that striving behavior has upon an institution's expenditures. While not the first study to examine such effects, it was the first to look across a multitude of institutional types, spanning seven levels of Carnegie classifications and encompassing public and private not-for-profit bachelors-granting schools to…

This dissertation sought to provide a better understanding of early alumnus identity at a public Midwestern university. Unlike a majority of alumni studies, this study used a qualitative case study methodology to examine alumni identity among participants through the use of personal interviews. Participants were 10-11 years post graduation from…

America's great public universities were founded with the highest expectations of academic excellence and service to their states. Overall, these institutions, often called the "flagship universities," do a poor job of ensuring that undergraduate students engage in an intellectually vibrant campus culture and leave with a solid…

Leadership profile pages on organizational websites have become staged opportunities for impression management. This research uses content analysis to examine the strategies of assertive impression management used to construct the leadership Web presence of the 70 presidents of national public universities, as identified in the "US News and…