There has been much debate on the concept of student as customer/consumer in higher education but little empirical research, most of which lacks a solid theoretical framework. This article summarises the key arguments in the literature and their shortcomings, proposes a framework to analyse student perceptions and behaviour, and reports research…

Quality assurance in higher education has been an important issue not only in western countries but also in China. This study, based on Harman's framework, analyses the features and implementation of undergraduate teaching evaluation (UTE) through case studies of four different universities in Guangdong province, southern China. The findings…

Obtaining competitive advantage has become a recurrent necessity, in successful organisational management. Nowadays, intangibles represent an excellent opportunity to attain these advantages. Given its social impact, the organisational image is one of the most important intangibles to work with. In this research, a model based on the determination…

Faced with conflicting pressures of student diversity, retention and demands for change in a volatile international education marketing environment, universities have become more focused on enhancing student experience as a strategic response to achieving competitive advantage. Based on an exploratory qualitative study conducted in a UK…

Studies of student persistence at the undergraduate level are numerous and well known to those in the field, but at the graduate level, they are far more limited. The latter generally focus on doctoral candidates or those enrolled in professional programs. Master's-degree candidates, especially those who pursue a degree on a part-time basis at a…

The Advanced Academic Programs (AAP) of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) enrolls approximately 2,700 part-time graduate students across three physical locations. It is a complex organization whose target audience is a sophisticated consumer of higher education. With the support of Eduventures, AAP…

This research study investigated the behaviour and interactions of university students as they engaged with ill-structured and well-structured assessment tasks. Twenty students participated in a one-semester intensive design study in a course on "Vietnamese traditional culture". The students worked in five-person groups that were mixed-gender and…

The success of the US economy has always been its ability to innovate, create, invent, and commercialize groundbreaking discoveries. Today, Americans seem to be losing their edge and have begun to suffer an "innovation deficit." The authors say re-engineering the entire US educational system in order to foster and enhance necessary creativity and…

Since 2001, the Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) at The George Washington University (GW) has managed a cooperative education program with a network of nine respected universities in South America. This "governance and political management" program serves working professionals in the civil service, political party offices, advocacy…

There is a presumption among many policy makers that higher education is not necessary for economic growth and development; it is literacy and basic education and at best secondary education that are argued to be important. Estimates of internal rate of return contributed to strengthening of such a presumption. Accordingly, higher education has…

Nearly 500 members of the public rated 20 university degree subjects in terms of their usefulness for employability. The top three were Law, Maths and English whereas the bottom three were Fine Art, Anthropology and Theology. A factor analysis was conducted to group the 20 subjects into broad academic fields. Five factors were identified,…

This article explores from a sociological perspective how MA students of Education perceive the quality of their teachers' teaching in higher education. Power relations in the teaching and learning process in the classroom, and the criteria students use to qualify their perception of teaching in higher education, are examined. In this qualitative…

This article is based on a small study of thirteen professional doctorate students in two universities, comprising nine current students and four who had completed. The sample consisted of lecturer/practitioners, ie those who had made the transition from practice into higher education and other professionals including headteachers and teachers in…

This article is about changes in the employment of graduates over the four decades since data on their first destinations was first published in the early 1960s. It aims to identify the main changes and their implications. The data used are drawn from questionnaire surveys with very high response rates (over 80 per cent). The main finding is that…

This article reports findings from an empirical study of students' views of support in higher education. Findings from questionnaires and telephone interviews suggest that the characteristics and sources of support can be understood in relation to university and non-university led systems. Students identified non-university led support, for…