Since the recent changes in the system of student finance in England, studies focusing on the impact of increased debt and the effect of the bursary system have concluded that the chances of achieving stated policy objectives in relation to widening and increasing levels of participation have been reduced. This study considers the full financial…

Are policies to increase women's share among university professors effective? The importance of gender equality on the labor market has been well established, but our understanding of what kind of policy is effective to increase the share of women is still unclear. Three sets of factors explain women's low shares at higher job levels, notably…

For several years Portuguese higher education institutions have been waiting for the legislation framework necessary for the implementation of the Bologna process. Such legislation was passed quite recently (2006) and has resulted in an unexpected flood of proposals presented at very short notice by higher education institutions to the Ministry.…

Australia's Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) is an income contingent loan scheme, in which university students pay back part of the costs of their tuition after their post-university income reaches a certain threshold, is an important policy innovation for the financing of higher education. However, its critics claim that HECS increases…

The paper examines the results of a study of strategic plans in community colleges in Ontario, Canada between 1995 and 2005. The system was very similar to centralized systems in many jurisdictions including China. The study found that (1) the strategies of those colleges were more alike than different; (2) the strategic content of the plans as…

A policy sociology approach is taken to examine the connections between neo-liberalism, post-secondary provincial education (PSE) policy in Canada and the impact of those policies. Our thesis regarding the broad political economy of PSE is that over the last two decades the adoption of this ideology has been a major cause of some dramatic changes…

At the core of higher education is the experience of students whose focus for learning is often directed towards their future employability. In this paper, we explore the intersections between two large international research projects involving over 500 students. Interviews with students yielded their conceptions of learning and work in specific…

The paper provides a descriptive account of recent changes in Italian higher education policy, focusing in particular on the impact that recent reforms have had on the internal governance of the nation's universities. The paper shows how the government's policy of reform (which is currently moving away from the traditional "command and control"…

Reform in higher education financing in Kenya has been occasioned by both endogenous and exogenous variables. Internal pressures of a declining economy, rapid demographic growth and increased inter- and intra-sectoral competition for scare financial resources, couple with external neo-liberal doctrine championed by global donors like the World…

Student loans program is one of the most controversial phenomena in financing higher education in Ghana, but its importance as a cost sharing mechanism is incontestable. This paper describes the challenge of financing higher education in Ghana. It provides a critique of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) Student Loans Scheme,…

This article focuses on responses of higher education institutions to governmental policy. We investigate the influence of organisational characteristics on the implementation of quality management in Hungarian higher education institutions. Our theoretical framework is based on organisational theories (resource dependency and…

Although there is a growing interest of policy makers in higher education issues (especially on an international scale), there is still a lack of theoretically well-grounded comparative analyses of higher education policy. Even broadly discussed topics in higher education research like the potential convergence of European higher education systems…

As part of the ongoing enhancement and assurance of quality in the UK higher education sector, universities have been required by the Higher Education Funding Council of England to prepare learning and teaching strategies since 1999. As part of an institutional strategy development process, an investigation of currently available strategies was…

This article focuses on the steering of higher education systems in the light of political science and public management approaches. It first recalls that an important part of the existing literature on higher education is focused on public policies in terms of reforms and decision-making, while the other part is dedicated to discovering and…

Chile's higher education system stands out as being one of the most privatized and open to the market in the world. Recently, the Chilean Congress passed Law #20.027 of 2005, which provides the legal framework for the creation of a student loan system guaranteed both by the State and by higher education institutions (HEIs), financed by the private…