The paper seeks to understand the trajectories of students who defer entry to university. The study was conducted in Lithuania, a former Soviet Union republic. The phenomenon of a "gap year" is usually associated with young people, who decide not to enter higher education schools immediately after receiving secondary education, instead…

Recent decades have seen a dramatic expansion in the educational attainment and occupational opportunities of German women. Both the educational and occupational positions of the mothers and those of their daughters are continuously changing across cohorts. Our study aims to detect the probability of daughters to experience maternal-line…

This study attempts to explain a process of inserting global transnational elements into an undergraduate sociology course. After a review of global themes covered in introductory sociology textbooks, the author administered two projects (Global Multiculturalism and Sociology of Wal-Mart) in an undergraduate sociology course. The current study…

In the last two decades, higher education institutions have invested significant resources to internationalise, due to economic, political, academic and cultural pressures. Students play a dual role in this process: as customers, selecting institutions based on respective reputations (including the international dimension) and as outputs of…

I argue that 2011 witnessed a series of challenges to neoliberalism on a global scale perhaps not seen since the political upheavals of 1968, and that media spectacle provided the form of a series of global insurgences from the North African Arab Uprisings to the Occupy movements. Crises of neoliberalism also generated movements in Italy, Spain,…

In this article, we use interview data collected in a four-year longitudinal study of first-generation university students to answer the question: how might the ethnicity of first-generation students impact their university experiences? After briefly examining previous literature written on the educational achievement levels of ethnic-minority…

In the course of educational expansion, student populations have become more diverse. This paper represents an international literature review on the topic of first-generation students (FGS), i.e. students whose parents have not obtained a higher education qualification. On the basis of more than 70 research articles and reports on FGS from…

This paper examines the theoretical perspectives I utilised in my doctoral research to uncover the role of class and gender in my respondents' stories and experiences of their career success. I argue that adopting an economic model for conceptualising the influence of social class and gender in the respondents' stories and experiences of their…

This study aims to contribute to the fields of sociology of education and Canadian sociological teaching. English and French Canadian sociology of education course outlines were systematically analysed in order to assess how national context, language and internal divisions influence the undergraduate teaching of sociology of education. The…

This paper analyses the educational attainment of Tajikistani adults born between 1947 and 1989. Adults in the oldest cohorts completed school during the educational expansion of the Soviet period and the youngest cohorts completed their education in the post-Soviet period, which was marked by educational contraction. To date, there is not a clear…

This paper presents some of the findings that emerged out of a national survey carried out in the school year 2005-2006 in various parts of Greece. The main aim of the study was to explore the effects of various "family" factors on the "student performance" in the (national) higher education entrance examinations. From the analysis of data it…

It is widely recognised that higher education is crucial for socio-economic growth in developing countries. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is lagging behind in this regard in spite of a strong expansion of universities in the last decades. However, this growth may have led to a deterioration of the quality of higher education. There is no dearth of…

This paper enquires into the grounds for convergence of judgements in a situation of blind peer review, where reviewers are asked to assess the standing of scholars in a disciplinary field. The paper first considers traditional accounts of peer review and threats to its reliability and validity. Next it examines the grounds for disciplinary…

Neoliberalism has utterly failed as a viable model of economic development, yet the politics of culture associated with neoliberalism is still in force, becoming the new common sense shaping the role of government and education. This "common sense" has become an ideology playing a major role in constructing hegemony as moral and intellectual…

Security is an integral component of the relationships that shape the lives of students hosted by foreign countries. International student security became a source of contention between nations in 2008 when China's Government charged that Australia was failing to adequately provide for the safety of Chinese students. We discuss Beck's theorisation…