Conversations with colleagues across the sector suggest that the use of mentoring as an organisational development tool in higher education (HE) is increasing. In an era where universities are constantly urged to do more with less, it offers a potential means of using the institution's own staff to train and support each other, thus maximising the…

There is limited literature that looks at the evolution of student services in the UK and their effectiveness in providing student support. Student support is broadly defined as all services that support students to learn. Academic and non-academic support are essential mechanisms in providing holistic student support. In this article, the author…

The nature of higher education in further education colleges is poorly understood, even though it is central to government policies on expansion, diversity and widening participation in English higher education. One reason has to do with scale. Another has to do with complexity. A final reason has to do with their status as further education…

As the author's contribution to a series marking the Golden Jubilee of the Association of University Administrators, he reflects on changes in quality assurance over the past twenty years and speculates on what the future may hold for quality as the association moves into a new and very different competitive regime. He begins by discussing the…

This paper argues that universities do have responsibilities to their wider communities, and that those responsibilities--or that "engagement"--should be managed in a way that is not solely dictated by the university. The paper, which focuses on UK universities, first explains why the contemporary context makes it important to consider communities…

In a rapidly changing external environment, for many universities, restructuring of the academic organisation is the most important leadership challenge. In this article, the author provides an analysis of academic restructuring in UK universities. Using the "Commonwealth Universities Yearbook", he looked at the changes in academic structures…

Most UK universities can trace their current management information systems back to significant investments made in the 1990s, largely fuelled by concerns about the millenium bug and a change from character interfaces to graphical user interfaces following the introduction of the personal computer. It was during this period that institutions also…

The author argues that a Higher Education Bill will be lacking in the future, as promised in the 2011 White Paper on HE; and hence the regulatory framework for English HE will, for the immediate future at least, have to evolve within the law as it is rather than via new legal powers. The essential issue is how to extract the benefits of market…

International education is the third largest export industry in Australia and is worth almost A$20 billion. The last ten years have witnessed significant growth in both onshore and offshore enrolments of international students in Australian universities. The offshore component of all Australian universities has been subject to scrutiny by the…

The student experience in higher education is firmly placed at the top of the strategic agenda for the majority of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK at present. In the current climate of public cuts, universities increasingly have to strike a delicate balance between cost efficiencies and delivery of the high-quality university…

Getting the branding right for one's university will make a difference to student recruitment, and probably to wider perception in the community. Everyone in higher education knows, and most people outside it know, that reputation is "everything" to universities. In this article, the author draws a distinction between "branding"--which is what…

In this article, the author argues that the relationship between higher education and the media changes continually and yet is, or should be, grounded in certain unchanging principles. He outlines some of the changes that have taken place over the past ten years in the relationship between higher education and the media; highlights the decline in…

Last October Lord Browne of Madingley published the long-awaited report of his "Independent Review into Higher Education Funding and Student Finance" (Independent Review 2010). Browne and his colleagues recommended the removal of the "cap" on the tuition fees chargeable for first degrees by taxpayer-funded universities in England. This cap,…

The renewal of quality assurance in Australian higher education comes at a time when the higher education sectors in Australia and around the world are experiencing a number of key challenges. These include: ongoing decline in public funding of universities; the massification of higher education and demand for it during global recession;…

It is not so long ago that universities shunned words such as "public relations" and "marketing," preferring to describe staff working in these areas as information officers and even assistant registrars and with such staff drawn from a cadre of generalist administrators. If they really had to be specific, then an acceptable word was "publicity".…