Universities that focus on urban research should exploit the advantage of their location by matching their curricular strengths to the needs of their respective communities. This article describes how Public Sector Programs (PSP) at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) developed extensive graduate degree and certificate programs in…

"College readiness" means that a student can enter a college classroom without remediation and successfully complete entry-level college requirements (Conley, 2012). In order for students to be considered college ready, they must acquire skills, content knowledge, and behaviors before leaving high school. Research on high-school performance…

According to the author, the setting for their nonprofit education center was close to ideal: Support from a dean who cares deeply about nonprofit organizations; encouragement from the university and its renewed focus on reaching beyond its walls on the eve of its centennial; and a generous gift from alumni who have been affiliated with the…

Analytics has a significant place in the future of higher education by guiding reform and system change. As this case study has shown, analytics can do more than evaluate what students have done and predict what they will do. Learning analytics can be transformative, altering existing pedagogical processes, research, data management, and…

Thomas Edison State College (TESC) and Colorado State University (CSU) offer significant contrasts in institutional culture, student demographics, faculty and institutional priorities and approaches to distance education course development and delivery. This article offers case studies showing that widely disparate program design and delivery…

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)…