This article first draws together a range of published statistics to analyse trends in participation in higher education in the UK over recent years. That provides evidence of the shifting profile in the student population and sets a context for examining emerging evidence of the impact of recent government policy decisions on control of student…

Extant between 2004 and 2011, Aimhigher was the UK government's flagship national initiative for widening participation to higher education for young people from disadvantaged social groups, with costs approaching 1 billion British Pounds. Its demise was predicated on a perceived lack of progress and the absence of compelling evaluative research.…

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…

Three university ranking systems in vogue have been shown in the previous issue of "Higher Education Review" to be capable of modifications to make them more parsimonious by using only about half of the number of predictors currently in use. This makes some of the predictors "redundant" as they contributed little to the overall ranking. It is…

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…

This essay is a contribution to the literature of critique of higher education policy and management. It offers a general discussion of problems arising from the proliferation of mechanisms of audit and quality assurance within the context of concerns about dependence on quantitative measures of values. It argues that uncritical dependence on…

This article proposes an applied theoretical framework that could assist education reformers in Confucian heritage culture (CHC) countries to adopt Western-developed learning practices successfully. This framework is needed because the literature has recently documented a large number of failures in educational reforms at CHC colleges. The main…

In the UK, and in many other countries, policy makers and funding bodies emphasise the importance of the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), as opposed to the HASS disciplines (humanities, arts and social sciences), in higher education. Yet an examination of the biographies of UK members of parliament (MPs)…

Recent interest in the number of complaints being raised by students in higher education may be attributed both to a general concern about quality and standards in universities and to the emerging role of the student as a "consumer". However, partly because of the highly sensitive nature of this topic, for students, staff and institutions, very…

In November 2010, the British Government, modifying one of the proposals in the Browne Report published in October, decided to allow English universities to charge tuition fees of up to 9,000 British Pounds, while removing almost all the public funding previously provided in the form of a block grant. This had consequences the Government should…

The outcome of university ranking is of much interest and concern to the many stakeholders, including university's sponsors, administrators, staff, current and prospective students, and the public. The results of rankings presented in the form of league tables, analogous to football league tables, attract more attention than do the processes by…

This article explores what is meant by "a balanced higher education system". It argues that the Clarkian "triangle of coordination" (Clark, 1983) and the more recent model of Martinez and Richardson (2003) should be replaced by one that distinguishes between "self" and "collective" interests in both the academy and the wider society. Such a scheme…

This study investigated how university students behaved and interacted as they were grouped in large and small groups and while they engaged in intra-group and inter-group peer assessment. One hundred forty five students from two classes at a university in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam participated in this one-term study. The students worked in…