Drawing on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's theory of "fitting" and "misfitting," this article analyzes from a critical disability lens the experiences of disabled students in higher education in the United Arab Emirates. Building on evidence collected from three case studies of misfitting/fitting, I argue that advocacy resulted in…

We review research on the history of education policy in colonial sub-Saharan Africa and among the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil through a political economy lens. While the supply of education was severely constricted in all of these cases, demand for education remained strong. Thus, even as authoritarian states have attempted…

This article explores the place of ideology and what I call "analytic allegiances" in the nascent higher education domain in Angola. Based on ethnographic research, it considers the post-War emergence of the sector and its implications for global higher education. Focusing primarily on two institutions, one state, one private, it probes…

The present article analyzes dissertations written by international doctoral graduates at Teachers College during the first two decades of the twentieth century. By focusing on the earliest period of the doctoral program, our work seeks to understand the role of the dissertation archive in producing and governing the emerging field of academic…

International development and education are often described as embodying colonized, capitalist, and modernist knowledge and practices. I take the position that as educators, our identities and positionalities, while not determinant, do affect our pedagogy of knowledge (re)production in these fields. Using critical autoethnography as methodology,…

Refugees pursuing higher education in the context of host countries face numerous challenges, but the literature is sparse on relevant university supports. This article evaluates the existing transnational literature using quantitative textual analysis to point toward the need for scholarship on intersectional programs serving refugee students. We…

Tensions over borders lie at the center of a growing global debate. But while politicians argue, some US higher education institutions (HEIs) have made education and protections possible for displaced students. Using securitization theory and social movement theory to examine the role of HEIs as they responded to immigration policies attempted by…

Jordanian families today face an educational edifice significantly changed by privatization, increased costs, and market-driven logics. While some students resist these structures through protests, we highlight the everyday ways in which Jordanians negotiate these changes and try to make the system work for them. Specifically, we analyze the…

Adolescent girls more often than boys expect higher education in nearly all 50 education systems in TIMSS 2011, before and after controls for effects of educational achievement, education-conducive family resources, and "liking school." At a macrolevel, this gender disparity is moderately correlated with the gender disparity in…

The demise of apartheid in 1994 introduced many changes to the social, political, and economic sectors of South Africa with similar changes in the higher education sector. This article offers an integrative review and analysis of higher education policies implemented and legislation passed that significantly impacted the nature of the South…

This article examines Minzu University of China (MUC), the nation's leading ethnic minority university, relative to faculty perspectives regarding initiatives to strengthen MUC as a comprehensive university. Based on a case-study approach, and employing organizational culture as a theoretical lens, the authors identify three narratives of change…

Random selection is a fair way to break ties between applicants of equal merit seeking admission to institutions of higher education (with "merit" defined here in terms of the intrinsic contribution higher education would make to the applicant's life). Opponents of random selection commonly argue that differences in strength between…

This special issue introduces a set of article addressing the question of what "fairness" means with respect to the distribution of access to higher education. Articles herein address the criteria that "should" be used to allocate funding, offers of admission at selective institutions, and conceiving and assessing …

This article discusses admissions policies to higher education during the Communist regime in Bulgaria (1946-89). It argues that under the conditions of the Bulgarian Communist regime, admissions policies were not only a component of the higher education system--viewed as an institution--but part and parcel of the process through which power was…

Access to higher education in Poland is changing due to the demography of smaller cohorts of potential students. Following a demand-driven educational expansion after the collapse of communism in 1989, the higher education system is now contracting. Such expansion/contraction and growth/decline in European higher education has rarely been…