University mentoring programs are often implemented as an instrument to support students' personal development and successful transition to university. Scholars and practitioners alike emphasize the importance of matching for high-quality peer mentoring. However, mentoring theory and research lacks specificity regarding relevant characteristics…

Assessment of student learning is commonly understood as a seemingly objective measurement of learning outcomes. It is seen as fair that assessment targets students' abilities -- not their identities or personalities. This idea fails to acknowledge how assessment transforms its object, the students, often in unintended ways. While higher education…

This study is among the few that attempt to connect two popular topics, the rapid growth of Chinese higher education and the shifting China-US university relations. Now both the Chinese and US higher education are among the top systems in the world--in terms of their sizes and standards. While Chinese and American university ties have been among…

Classifications are a basic tool for research, which allow summarizing the diversity of objects in a number of categories that fits the cognitive abilities of the human mind. Their relevance for higher education is emphasized by the differentiation of institutional profiles. Yet, unlike in the US, there is currently no classification of European…

In this article, I discuss how the principle of exemplarity developed in the 1970s by the Marxist educators and theorists Oskar Negt and Knud Illeris can be a model for a deliberative curriculum. Today's crisis-ridden discourses of 'taking back', 'reclaiming', etc., the practices and purposes of the university are evidence of a widespread…

Drawing from the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) framework, this paper aims to study the influence of academic researchers' ability, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and opportunity on their performance. We conducted an empirical analysis using a sample of 607 academic researchers to examine the relationships between the three AMO…

This paper builds on the dominant employability model by Dacre Pool and Sewell -- CareerEDGE model by developing an extended CareerEDGE model for embedding, evaluating and monitoring employability skills relevant to undergraduate students. Drawing on the current literature on employability, the 'Extended CareerEDGE Model' is developed by…

Although the nature of the academic profession and related career advancement has been well documented, little empirical evidence has been provided on the professional agency that academics employ to advance from one academic rank to another. Adopting an agency focus, this study therefore investigates what strategies academics adopt when seeking…

There is an ongoing debate in higher education about the value of broad programmes versus specialised programmes. Educational professionals argue that students use the space provided by broad programmes to develop interests in diverse domains, while the scope of specialised programmes allows students to converge in interests. The present study…

For two centuries, academics and their universities have competed for prominence and vied to demonstrate that their institutions are at the center of the scholarly world. Scientific advances in particular fields, reciprocal academic visits and conferences, impressive physical architecture, and publishing in shared venues and a "lingua…

The responses of higher education (HE) institutions towards the climate crisis and escalating social inequalities have been researched from either 'top-down' (i.e. institutionally-led) or 'bottom-up' (i.e. student-led) perspectives. As scholars call for enhanced insight into the space between these two poles, this paper provides an…

Student dropout is a major concern in studies investigating retention strategies in higher education. This study identifies which variables are important to predict student dropout, using academic data from 3583 first-year students on the Business Administration (BA) degree at the University of Barcelona (Spain). The results indicate that two…

Systems thinking is challenging but clearly important in higher education to understand relationships between different elements influencing the quality and student learning and achievement. A similar challenge is found in healthcare, where patient safety activities are more and more seen and dealt with in a broader system perspective. A…

Drawing on various disciplinary and scholarly approaches to the multiple roles of higher education in society, this paper offers a new conceptualisation of the non-economic contributions of higher education. The conceptual model identifies two basic dimensions in higher education's contributions to society. The first, axiological dimension…

There is limited research regarding university students' academic achievement and what influences it. We argue that university students' academic achievement could be influenced by different factors to those observed for schoolchildren. We investigated whether university students' beliefs about intelligence ('implicit theories'), self-efficacy and…