Higher education in general and state-funded institutions especially will need to assess what an undergraduate education means in a changed geo-political socio-economic environment. For business schools, employability and future careers are stated outcomes to define a quality business education. Recent empirical scholarship has indicated…

Within high-participation systems of higher education such as China, the value of degrees is divided between credentials offering relatively high positional value and those offering less value. With that, institutional hierarchy plays a significant role in shaping graduate employability. This paper illustrates the contrasting experiences of two…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the effect of experience abroad, academic success and university reputation on students' employability in the Lebanese labor market. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses a between-subject design to identify whether academic success, university reputation and experience abroad have an impact on how…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of family socioeconomic background on university rankings, efforts in VETs, and job satisfaction of university graduates. The family socioeconomic background and mediation potential, which are independent variables, are identified through university rankings to identify mechanisms that affect job…

The objective of this study of student-consumers in higher education is to investigate the direct influence of student choice factors on student expectations. The mediating role of perceptions of employability in the relationship between costs of study (fees) and student satisfaction, and the outcome variable of students' recommendations, is…

Over the past few decades, university rankings have become an increasingly important factor in the higher education sector. Universities are ranked based on various criteria such as research output, teaching quality, and graduate employability. However, there is a growing movement to incorporate sustainability and social impact into the ranking…

Purpose: This study examined the factors impeding the implementation of micro-credentials and accepting it as a credible source of earning professional qualifications and certifications necessary for pursuing higher education or other career goals. Design/methodology/approach: The factors were identified by reflecting on the recent literature and…

Positioning strategy and ranking are critical issues in an increasingly competitive higher education landscape. Unless there is conceptual congruence between positioning strategies and rankings, the signals may become diffused and confusing for prospective students. This paper seeks the congruence between positioning strategies and ranking. Since…

We aim to investigate the factors influencing student choice in the private higher education (HE) sector in Kurdistan-Iraq. Hence, this research attempts to add to the literature in terms of understanding student university choice, in general, and address the gap in the literature in the context of Middle Eastern studies including Kurdistan, in…

Hundreds of colleges have changed their names to signal higher quality. We estimate how this affects college choice and the labor market performance of college graduates. Administrative data show that name-changing colleges enroll higher-aptitude students, with larger effects for attractive-but-misleading name changes and among students with less…

This article aims to examine the employment prospects of graduates from Sino-foreign cooperative universities (SFCUs) compared with those from local Chinese universities. Drawing on the annual employment quality reports released by six SFCUs, the findings indicated that SFCU graduates had distinct advantages in terms of both further study and…

This study investigates the changing discourses of the value of degrees in prospectuses between 1976 and 2013, chosen due to the massification of higher education and use of the particular marketing tool of prospectuses. This research analysed the messages in prospectuses through the period in four English higher education institutions of…

Purpose: In the last decade, female students' enrolment in higher education has experienced significant growth. However, male and female students still differ in criteria set of choosing higher education institutions. While several studies have been disentangled in developed countries in analyzing gender differences in pursuing higher education, a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors influencing Indonesian students' choice of university by estimating the trade-off students make in selecting a university. Design/methodology/approach: Conjoint analysis was used to examine the relative importance and the part-worth scores of the attributes that influence students'…

The link between higher education and employment is central to the understanding of social stratification and social mobility. We use three theories to analyse the importance of education and credentials in recruitment decisions in European graduate labour markets: human capital (HC), network capital (NC) and reputational capital (RC) theory.…