Through his early studies of the character of adult schools and community colleges in California, Burton Clark launched a set of ideas, sociological and educational, that served as baseline concepts in the study and practice of American higher education. His book "The Open Door College" ranks among the classic accounts of a type of…

"The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds" represented an impressive investigation of the largest and most complex national academic community in the world, which seriously attempted a detailed representation of the variations in its form. Its ethnographic orientation to understanding the internal academic life through exploratory…

This paper proposes the importance of qualitative research synthesis to the field of higher education. It examines seven key texts that undertake synthesis in this field and compares essential features and elements across studies. The authors indicate strengths of the approaches and highlight ways forward for using qualitative research synthesis…