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…

This article considers the relationship between artistic research, creative production and exegesis. What it is that renders a particular creative outcome as significant and the ways in which an accompanying critical text functions as a navigational tool, directing readers towards points of entry into the overall work, is at the core of the paper;…

Because the globalization of traditional research universities has so far been largely an elite phenomenon, for-profit higher education has become the kind of high-growth worldwide industry that would attract entrepreneurs. The for-profit sector, by contrast, has targeted a vast and vastly different student market: non-elite learners, often poorly…

The author has been a witness to the birth of the personal computer culture, with its intense one-on-one relationships with machines, and then to the development of the networked culture, with people using the computer to communicate with each other. In her most recent work on the revolutions in social networking and sociable robotics, she sees a…

This article looks at the phenomenon of mal-employment among college graduates in the United States, beginning with an overview of labor-market trends and the effects of the Great Recession on the job-market experiences of young people, including recent college graduates. It then defines "mal-employment" and examines its incidence over time. The…

As other universities across the country struggle with their financial challenges, continuing education units can serve the same pioneering role in the development of new financial and budget systems. Confronted by serious financial shortfalls during the last three decades, university administrators started to focus on new budget and revenue…

Several years ago, members of the Futures and Markets (FAM) Commission of the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) realized that the commission was uniquely positioned to put a face on the future of continuing higher education. The commission took on an ambitious research agenda in fall 2010 to identify emerging or…

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 article describes a model that can be used to analyze student enrollment data and can give insights for improving retention of part-time students and refining institutional budgeting and planning efforts. Adult higher-education programs are often challenged in that part-time students take courses less reliably than full-time students. For…

In the very near future, the huge and rapidly growing store of free, online learning opportunities will completely transform higher continuing education. The beginnings of this transformation are already evident and the factors compelling this change are so powerful that free learning is no longer a "trend." Rather, free learning is an imperative…