The past three decades have witnessed the growing influence of market forces on higher education, resulting in what is defined by Fairclough (1993) as the marketization of academic discourse. The present study attempts to examine the effect of such trend on university website homepages in China, which is an under-researched genre of higher…

The paper assesses the evolution of efficiency of Italian public universities for the period 2000-2010. It aims at investigating whether their levels of efficiency showed signs of convergence, and if the well-known disparity between northern and southern regions decreased. For this purpose, we use a refinement of data envelopment analysis, namely…

The starting point of this study is the argument that not only rankings of higher education institutions (HEIs) are inescapable, but so is the constant criticism to which they are subjected. Against this background, the paper discusses how HEIs from Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEECs) are (non)represented in the main global university…

The National Higher Education Strategic Plan Beyond 2020 aims at further strengthening Malaysian research universities and envisions that two Malaysian universities will be among the Top 100 world universities. To date there are 5 research universities in Malaysia, namely University of Malaya (UM), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Universiti…

This paper focuses on how people learn to become teachers. It draws on the experiences of student-teachers and tutors at a College of Education in the south of Ghana who engaged with an iterative data-generation process over one academic year. While increasing attention is given to the learning experiences of children in Sub-Saharan Africa,…

This paper presents findings from a recent study on choice-making among teachers, school leaders and parents in a for-profit British international school in Kuwait. Using a Bourdieusian field analysis, the choice-making of the various stakeholders is investigated to reveal their positionality within the school's social space, to examine the…

This study provides an insider's perspective on why engineering undergraduates at elite Indian universities lack academic motivation. Using interpretive qualitative research (actors approach), we uncover students' perceptions of academic (de)motivation and group them into three broad categories: faculty-related, course-related and…

India desperately needs good governance in colleges and universities so as to create a culture of innovation, and entrepreneurship so as to become and remain competitive in world market. Poor governance and poor leadership is observed to be the root cause for all ills in university education. Indian students and professors are brilliant but…

Current literature suggests two kinds of congruence that come into play when students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds enter elite universities: academic fit and social fit. Yet, in most of the studies on habitus transformation, the differences between the two are seldom mentioned. This may imply that the transformation of one aspect…

Research Productivity (RP) is the key element in the establishment of ranking and rating system in the Higher Education (HE) sector. Despite of the many initiatives taken to enliven the research culture among academic staff, there are still constraints and resistance towards conducting research. Therefore, this study attempts to identify the…

This design case describes the process by which a private office was renovated using the Working Labs model, which engages students, faculty, and staff in hands-on engagement from project conception through completion and beyond into ongoing evaluation of everyday use. The spaces that follow the Working Labs model are intended to provide students…

Global higher education, including that of Asia, has been facing many challenges, notably declining government funding and simultaneously increased influences of neoliberalism on its outlook, aspirations, policies and practices. This reality has put the role and purpose of higher education (HE) under testament, particularly in unprecedented…

School ratings are a ubiquitous feature of the U.S. educational system. Alongside state-mandated measures of school performance, non-state organizations such as GreatSchools.org and Niche have created consumer-oriented systems of school ratings that draw on publicly available information about schools. Claiming the purpose of their rating systems…

The Taiwan Ministry of Education (MOE) put forth the aim for the top university project (ATU) in 2005 with the aim of improving the worldwide academic competitiveness and ranking performance of selected Taiwanese universities. With the conclusion of the second phase of the project at the end of 2017, this study aims to critically examine and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate and report students' perception of service quality in a university by examining the perceptual context of service quality with respect to students' loyalty behavior, image of the university and culture/values. Design/methodology/approach: A research framework is developed for quality assessment…