Distance education permeates the field of professional and continuing education to such an extent that quality assurance (QA) is a topic no distance educator or administrator should avoid. Quality assurance is an issue not just for continuing education but also for higher education generally. Given the disruptive impact of distance education and…

In 2002 President Martin Jischke initiated a new era in strategic planning at Purdue. Under his leadership, strategic planning became a centralized activity with unit plans aligned to the university plan. Strategic goals were designed to have maximum impact, which would be measurable through metrics. Strategic planning at Purdue would be an…

This article focuses on how Kansas State University (K-State) built partnerships with all 19 community colleges in Kansas and streamlined the process of providing place-bound adult students with access to complete a bachelor's degree while continuing to live, work, and serve in their home communities. Kansas State University (K-State) has been an…

In 2009 the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst), in collaboration with Hancock Shaker Village (HSV), created a new two-year master's degree in historic preservation and architectural conservation for professionals in the field. Combining university courses with training and classes on site at a national historic landmark, the…

Online asynchronous courses constitute a significant portion of Tulane University's School of Continuing Studies (SCS) curriculum. Online instruction is sufficiently important to the School of Continuing Studies that it merited special attention in the form of a two-year review to ensure its quality. The review identified and implemented different…

This article is about graduate employment, unemployment and underemployment. It looks at the development of employability skills inuniversity education as a response to evidence of the unemployment and underemployment of new graduates and assesses the impact of that response. The article then offers another approach to graduate employability based…

This study evaluates the relationship between student counselling intervention and university persistence. We find that students deemed high-risk can directly benefit from student counselling intervention thus reducing their propensity to withdraw. We find that the characteristics of students who are at greatest risk of withdrawal include both…

Internationally universities have been characterised by shrinking government funding, fierce competition for student enrolments, and greater pressures to become commercially viable. It is against this complex background that academic leaders have been required to confront and resolve a multitude of conflicting interests as they seek to balance a…

This article discusses relations between happiness and higher education in the age of information, focusing on the need for the university to pursue happiness. Three questions are addressed. First, why should higher education pursue happiness? Second, what are the shapes and characteristics of higher education in the information age? Third, what…

The sector is entering a climate of future funding cuts and fee rises, which are likely to prompt a growing number and widening range of disputes. This article describes the launch of a new Improving Dispute Resolution Advisory Service. The particular questions raised in this context by the introduction of student charters and the relationship of…

To boost the social and economic outlook of the country, Turkey has recently initiated educational reform at all levels and especially higher education, including organizational restructuring and expansion for increased accessibility. The swift increase in the number and size of universities has resulted in a challenge to find trained faculty. One…

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…

Declining public finances and ever increasing national and international competition force state-owned German universities to adapt to an increasingly competitive environment. In a first phase the universities have concentrated their efforts on the optimisation of budgeting processes and on the development of strategies and goals to come to a more…

In an Editorial in "Times Higher Education" (2009) extensive comment was given on the work of Furedi (2009) on the culture of complaint and the application to higher education of the consumer model. The discussion included many apparently strong criticisms of this use of the consumer model. "Higher Education Review" has itself published articles…

This article does not follow the widespread assumption or even conviction that the Bologna process is the most important reform of higher education in Europe in modern times. Instead it analyses the Bologna process in the context of previous and ongoing programmes, measures and activities by European bodies and national governments aiming at…