Gender Equality Programmes in German Institutions of Higher Education—The North Rhine-Westphalia Case

This article describes the theoretical basis and presents some results of an empirical investigation into all the institutions of higher education in North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest of the German La ?nder that has the largest number of universities (twenty-seven universities and universities of applied sciences, (fachhochschulen), in all). For these institutions, a gender equality policy was elaborated in 1993 by the Ministry of Science and Research of the Land. It is titled ''Basic Principles for the Promotion of Women at the Institutions of Higher Education in North Rhine-Westphalia'' (referred to as ''Basic Principles'' in the text to follow). It became compulsory for all the universities in 1993 and for all the fachhochschulen, as well, in 1995. In 1998, the author was commissioned to assess the impact of these ''basic principles'' three years later.     

On General Education in Higher Education Institutions of China Mainland

This thesis points out the main problems consisting in general education in higher education institutions （HEIs） of China mainland. General education need to be further improved and so does the quality of general education curriculum. The faculty construction should be more reasonable; the teaching administration models and the evaluation system should also be perfected. This thesis is also aimed to put forward the countermeasures： to pay more attention to general education, improve the quality of the general education curriculum with every effort, develop the faculty urgently, ameliorate the teaching administration models and establish the scientific and proper evaluation system of general education curriculum, and so on.     

Analysis of Private Higher Education in China

Considering the nature of education, the author holds that the fundamental function of education is to serve the customers, with relation to the internationalization of higher education in China. This paper illustrates the inevitability of development and the relative differences, by the discussion of benefit or non-benefit orientation of China＇s private higher education. It points out the direction of its development and the conjuncture of survival with the conclusion that the best option is development, provided the maintenance of our education sovereignty.     

Are Students Customers in Finnish Higher Education?

This study examines Finnish higher education students’ perceptions of whether students are customers, based on qualitative interview data. The article contributes to the discussion on students as customers by giving attention to students’ own voices from a country where tuition fees are not generally collected. The data are presented and analysed using a matrix of preference and perception of seeing students as customers. While the data contained student voices insisting that it is not appropriate to talk about customers because money is not involved, different orientations showing either a preference or perception of students as customers were also described. It is concluded that seeing a student as a customer might be a solution to various higher education challenges which are not all related to tuition fees.     

Examining Competition in Ontario’s Higher Education Market

Financial challenges have forced many publicly funded academic institutions in Ontario to adopt a corporate model and to use market tools to compete in the higher education market and maintain their enrolment and revenue levels. This study has analyzed how competition affects publicly funded universities in Ontario. Competition was examined by relating universities’ expenditures on price and non-price competitive variables (awards, marketing, graduates, and professors), as well as population to the total number of applicants, total number of enrollees, and capacity filling ratio over the period of 2006–2013. The study used quantitative research design and panel data regression method to draw conclusions. This study provides empirical evidence on how the effect of the adopted competitive variables varies for each university.     

Mergers in Higher Education -- Success or Failure?

Tertiary Education and Management - The demands for greater efficiency, higher quality and reductions in public budgets have meant that continually more countries are looking closely at the...     

Are There Any Gender Differences in the Perception of University Support During the Transition Period to Higher Education?

The purpose of this study is to determine if there are gender differences in the perception of university support. The study is based on a survey of 368 students in a Hong Kong university. The findings of the study are threefold. First, female students perceive the university as being more supportive in their academic adjustment than do male students (t = ?4.256, p < 0.001). Second, male students perceive the university as being more supportive in their social adjustment than do female students (t = 2.156, p < 0.05). Last, male students perceive the university as being more supportive in their psychological adjustment than do female students (t= 2.401, p < 0.05).

     

Gender Effects in Children’s Development and Education

This paper attempts to clarify several lines of research on gender in development and education, inter‐relating findings from studies on intuitive/informal knowledge with those from research on achievements and attitudes in science. It acknowledges the declining proportions of male teachers world‐wide and examination successes which indicate a reversal of educational disadvantage from female to male; as well as the recent evidence on the effects of the gender of teachers upon student success. An empirical contribution to the literature is offered, drawing from the gender‐related findings from research on children’s cosmologies in China and New Zealand with 346 boys and 340 girls (of whom 119 boys and 121 girls participated in the current study). The investigation focused on children’s concepts of the motion and shape of the Earth through observational astronomy and gave children opportunities to express their ideas in several modalities. The in‐depth interviews allowed children to share their meanings with gender differences becoming apparent (e.g. girls’ superior ability to visually represent their cosmologies and boys’ greater awareness of gravity). However, these differences were not universal across genders or cultures and marked similarities were apparent both in the content of children’s responses and in their reasoning processes. By comparing boy/girl cosmological concept categories and by tracking their developmental trends by age, statistical evidence revealed the extent of the similarities within and across these diverse cultures. The findings reinforce those from the authors’ knowledge restructuring and cultural mediation studies and provide support for the view that boys and girls have similar, holistic‐rather‐than‐fragmented, cosmologies which have features in common across cultures and ethnic groups.     

The Structure of Higher Education Impacted by Distance Education

Ｒｅｃｅｎｔｌｙ ,ｐｕｓｈｅｄｂｙｔｈｅｉｎｔｅｒｎｅｔｔｅｃｈｎｏｌｏｇｙ ,ｔｈｅｄｉｓｔａｎｃｅｅｄｕｃａｔｉｏｎｗｏｒｌｄｗｉｄｅｈａｓｂｅｅｎｄｅ ｖｅｌｏｐｉｎｇｖｅｒｙｆａｓｔ .Ｔｈｅｐｏｌｉｃｙｏｆｇｏｖｅｒｎｍｅｎｔｓｏｆｍａｎｙｃｏｕｎｔｒｉｅｓｆｕｌｌｙｓｕｐｐｏｒｔｓｔｈｅｄｅｖｅｌｏｐｍｅｎｔ ,ｈｏｐｉｎｇｔｈａｔｔｈｅｉｒｅｄｕｃａｔｉｏｎａｌｉｎｖｅｓｔｍｅｎｔｃａｎｂｅｈｉｇｈｌｙｃｏｓｔｅｆｆｅｃｔｉｖｅｔｈｒｏｕｇｈｄｉｓｔａｎｃｅｅｄｕｃａｔｉｏｎ .Ａｓｔｈｅ…     

New Realities for Leadership and Governance in Higher Education?

This paper considers some of the new realities that are likely toaffect higher education, particularly those arising from developmentsin communication and information technologies. Four scenarios arepresented as illustrations of how higher education might change;some of the elements that make up these scenarios are alreadyemerging. The paper then explores the role that leadershipand governance play in helping institutions to address the newrealities, particularly as change impacts on institutional culture and functioning.     

Risks and Risk‐Based Regulation in Higher Education Institutions

Risk‐based regulation is a relatively new mode of governance. Not only does it offer a way of controlling institutions from the outside but it also provides the possibility of making an organisation’s achievements visible/visualisable. This paper comments on a list of possible risks that higher education institutions have to face. In a second step, it is discussed that a higher education institution changes when a framework of risk‐based regulation is adopted. The paper then illustrates how governance changes when the risk‐based regulation approach is transferred from a UK context to an overall European one with differing traditions of higher education.     

Meditation in Higher Education: Does it Enhance Cognition?

We predicted that students in a sociology course that included contemplative practices (i.e., mindfulness meditation) would show an increase in performance on higher level cognitive abilities (executive functions) over the semester compared to a control group of students. Change in executive functions performance was not significantly different between the two groups. However, when looking within the meditation group, the time spent meditating predicted the amount of executive function improvement, suggesting that the amount of time spent meditating is strongly related to the level of improvement. This finding provides preliminary support for benefits of meditation for students’ higher level cognitive abilities.     

Peer Feedback Improves Students’ Academic Self-Concept in Higher Education

Research in Higher Education - Peer feedback has been shown to be an effective strategy to improve academic achievement. However, little evidence is available about the effects of peer feedback on...     

Adult,Flexible Students’ Approaches to Studying in Higher Education

A Norwegian translation of the Approaches to Studying Inventory (ASI‐32) was administered to 1477 adult students attending flexible study programs in higher education in Norway (2004‐05). The intention was to investigate their approaches to studying, taking into account their educational backgrounds and their present, challenging study conditions. The latter being characterized by off‐campus studies and shortage of time due to working‐life and family obligations. This article is concerned with two questions: (1) Is prior education correlated with approaches to learning among these students? and (2) To what extent are contextual constraints, personal effort, and self‐efficacy associated with study approaches among these students? This study shows that adult, flexible students are primarily meaning oriented. The first‐time students among them, however, are more reproducing oriented than students with prior higher education. Self‐efficacy turned out to be more strongly associated with approaches than personal efforts. Obligations of everyday life, contrary to hypothesis, did not have the expected impact.     

Faculty Incivility in Higher Education of Afghanistan: Students’ Perspectives

Interchange - The study investigated students’ perception of faculty incivility in higher educations of Afghanistan. It studied faculty behaviors perceived the most uncivil by students and...     

Executive Compensation in Public Higher Education: Does Performance Matter?

Executive evaluation and compensation are central to organizational accountability and governance. Driven by increasing public demand on justifications and accountability for substantial salary increases for public university presidents, this paper is intended to shed light on the linkage between performance and executive compensation in public universities by examining the determinants of university presidents’ pay from 2004/2005 to 2008/2009 academic years. The central question is whether presidential compensation is related to a wide array of newly developed university performance measures or is independent of performance, i.e., university presidents are paid like bureaucrats in line with the widely supported conclusion in Jensen and Murphy (1990b) suggesting corporate CEOs are really paid like bureaucrats. Methodologically, Arellano–Bond dynamic panel model is applied to control for serial autocorrelation in the compensation data, i.e., university presidents’ pay in the current period is dependent to a great extent on that in the prior period. With extensive individual, institutional, and performance characteristics examined, it is concluded that performance related variables play a very limited role in determining public university presidents’ executive remuneration, when temporal autocorrelation is properly controlled, and presidential pay is strongly and persistently associated over time. The statistically insignificant pay-performance relationship together with the temporally persistent increases of presidential compensation may provide initial evidence supporting that public university presidents are paid like bureaucrats.     

Unravelling Quality in Higher Education: What Say the Students?

Abstract

The extant literature on quality assurance in higher education points to a dearth of empirical studies on students’ conceptions of quality in higher education. This interpretivist article reports on a study that explored the conceptions of quality in higher education by final year undergraduate students in six academic disciplines at Makerere University, Uganda. Data for the article was collected from 50 final year students in eight discipline-specific focus group discussions and was analysed using thematic analysis. Four conceptions of quality in higher education were evident from the participants’ responses, namely: quality as transformation (value-added); quality as fitness for purpose; quality as excellence; and quality as consistency/ perfection (zero-errors). Nevertheless, transformation and fitness for purpose featured as the dominant conceptions of quality in higher education and these conceptions of quality did not take place in a vacuum. The students rationalised transformation and fitness for purpose by what they perceived the purpose of higher education to be. The multiple and yet competing purposes of higher education occasioned the two definitions of quality in higher education. Therefore, consensus on the meaning of quality can be hastened by arriving at a common purpose of higher education in a given society rather than engaging with the notions of quality themselves. This thinking presupposes the idea that the purpose of higher education varies across time and space and the definition of quality in higher education should be responsive to the prevailing purpose(s) of higher education in a given society.