A Systematic Literature Review of Funding for Higher Education Institutions in Developed Countries

Resource allocation and funding in higher education is crucial to the success of reform and transformation of our higher education system. With a view to identifying trends and best practices in the area, utilizing a method of systematic literature review, we have critically reviewed relevant theories and practices from developed counties that are covered in the scholarly literature published in English in the past 10 years. Our review has revealed: (1) Several universal trends have exerted a decisive impact on resource allocation in higher education, for example, funding reduction and tuition fee increases, performancebased funding, privatization, corporatization, and internationalization; (2) Several theories underpin key research in the area, for example, new institutional economics, resource dependence theory, and political economy; (3) Several controversial issues have made their way into public debate, for example, higher education as a public good or private good, academic capitalism, educational equity, and the role of econometrics.     

Untangling the Grip of White Privilege in Education through Consultation and Systems Change: Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the articles in the special issue, School consultation grounded in social justice: Dismantling white privilege in education. The authors first highlight salient aspects of each of the five articles. The article ends with a call to action for educators to use consultation to effect systems change that will interrupt white privilege and racist practices in education.     

Evidencing student success and career outcomes among business and creative industries graduates

ABSTRACT

The teaching performance of higher education institutions is increasingly gauged by graduate employment outcomes. Measuring outcomes in full-time employment terms does not capture the complexities of underemployment, the rise of portfolio careers, the constraints of the labour market and graduate motivations for working arrangements that can allow greater flexibility and work-life balance. This study explores the career outcomes of Business and Creative Industries graduates using both traditional measures (full-time employment outcomes) and a suite of broader measures that examine career satisfaction, perceived employability, perceived career success, underemployment, and graduate motivations for seeking new roles. Findings confirm disciplinary differences in graduate experience, and raise some broad concerns about the quality of graduate employment, particularly given the lack of improvement in outcomes over time since course completion. Findings suggest graduates are optimistic about their career futures, despite unmet expectations – particularly on income.     

Encoding of the unconditioned stimulus in Pavlovian conditioning

Three experiments, using rats, demonstrated the encoding of a food unconditioned stimulus (US) in a simple Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. In all three studies, one stimulus was used to signal the delivery of pellets and a different stimulus was used to signal the delivery of sucrose. In Experiment 1, postconditioning devaluation of one of the food USs selectively reduced the frequency of conditioned magazine-directed behavior during the stimulus trained with that US. In Experiment 2, transfer of the stimuli to instrumental responses resulted in selective depression of the response trained with a different outcome. In Experiment 3, acquisition of stimulus-outcome learning was impaired by unsignaled intertrial presentations of the same outcome but not of a different outcome. These results indicate that a detailed representation of the outcome is encoded in the normal course of Pavlovian conditioning.