This paper presents the findings of a two-year EU-funded project (DG Education and Culture) "Benchmarking in European Higher Education", carried out from 2006 to 2008 by a consortium led by the European Centre for Strategic Management of Universities (ESMU), with the Centre for Higher Education Development, UNESCO-CEPES, and the Universidade de…

Higher education institutions in the UK are required, by law, to make "anticipatory" reasonable adjustments for students with disabilities. Inclusive teaching practice, if adopted across the sector, would ensure that the needs of students with disabilities are considered and provided for, before they even arrive on campus. This paper sets out the…

Part-time study is one of the foci of the widening participation agenda in the UK. The experiences of part-time students, however, have received remarkably little attention from scholars, especially in a comparative context. This paper explores existing historical data going back over a decade to identify the main themes of part-time experience at…

This paper focuses on assessing possible levers in the hands of a university's top management team for inducing or managing change when faced with environmental drives. The topic is discussed after analysing change in a university over a 20-year period. The case study underlines the opportunities and difficulties of linking external environmental…

This article examines the implications of the rise of managerialism for student participation in university governance. It explores this theoretically by proposing a matrix of ideal-type regimes of student governance based on the work of Hyden, Olsen and others. The working of this typology is illustrated in a case study of the student political…

Mergers are common phenomena in higher education institutions. Improving educational quality is typically one of the stated goals of university mergers. Yet, little information exists about how merging institutions approach this goal. This paper presents results from a study of planning documents created prior to four mergers in the Finnish higher…

Generating knowledge for various constituents and for society has always defined colleges and universities. Recent decades, though, have witnessed shifts in knowledge production and consumption. Research-oriented higher education institutions have developed closer linkages to for-profit firms, which have sought to exploit and commercialize…

Under-preparedness of students entering university has become increasingly challenging as South African universities struggle to ensure student success where schooling no longer provides sufficient preparation for university. Understanding the gap between being eligible and being ready for university study is of critical importance. Using Conley's…

This paper draws on an international study of the management challenges arising from diversifying academic and professional identities in higher education. These challenges include, for instance, the introduction of practice-based disciplines with different traditions such as health and social care, the changing aspirations and expectations of…

The aim of this paper is to study research strategies in the Humanities in Sweden. The Swedish higher education sector is under transformation and a new funding system has been proposed. The study investigates the university strategy processes, mainly at the dean's level. The results show that most institutions are active in order to be well…

The paper has a conceptual nature, and will depart from the literatures on performance management in general and public management in particular and confront them with the literature on higher education studies. Higher education mirrors the developments of other sectors, such as the increasing interest in performance measurement and the continuous…

The "raison d'etre" of higher education institutions is to educate individuals, undertake research, and disseminate knowledge into the public domain. Changing values and norms in HEIs, partly as a product of "managerialism", as well as increased competition for funding and other environmental factors, have moved autonomous institutions towards…

The study examined the level of autonomy in one of Nigeria's third-generation universities. Findings indicated that generally government intervention was rated as not unreasonable. Specifically, the study discovered that government never exerts any influence on the appointment, discipline, tenure and dismissal of staff; entry standards and pass…

This paper examines the performance of Thai public universities in terms of efficiency, using a non-parametric approach called data envelopment analysis. Two efficiency models, the teaching efficiency model and the research efficiency model, are developed and the analysis is conducted at the faculty level. Further statistical analyses are also…

Present higher education reforms in the Nordic countries diminish the role and influence of the state on the governance of higher education institutions. While still providing a framework for the management of higher education, in general, the state supervises rather than controls higher education institutions (HEIs). The rhetoric of change…