This study aims to explore Chinese students' experiences in the Dutch higher education system with a focus on classroom pedagogy. Based on interviews with 28 Chinese students from eight higher education institutions, it analyses Chinese students' understanding and reflections of teaching and learning practices, and the challenges they encounter.…

Internationalization is a key contemporary debate within Higher Education (HE). Many universities worldwide proclaim their "international" status, citing quantitative indicators, particularly international student and staff recruitment and outbound student mobility data to illustrate this. In this paper, we focus on the non-mobile…

Doctoral education as a policy field is an important link between educational, research and innovation policies. It is gaining importance in European and national policy discussions. Doctoral education policies are increasingly formulated at the supranational level, even though the European Commission does not possess formal competence in terms of…

In Europe, doctoral education systems have been systematically reformed. These reforms are aimed at improving the quality of research and the competitiveness of European countries. In Finland, the reform project of doctoral education started vigorously in the mid-1990s which has contributed significantly to the emergence of more structured…

This special issue focuses on the reforms and collaborations in Europe--China doctoral education. The articles in this special issue provide an insightful picture of the recent reforms in doctoral education in China and EU countries. Next to the structural reforms in Europe and China, the special issue papers have also specifically focused on…

Taking the establishment of structured doctoral programmes in Germany as an example, this paper focuses on how knowledge production in certain academic fields reshapes their doctoral education in a widely changing policy context. Based on case studies of eight graduate schools in three research fields, namely economics, life sciences, and…

Although the idea of the world-class university is not a new one, it has become increasingly commonplace in public policies around the globe, also gaining traction in states outside the global "core". Kazakhstan, the only Central Asian member of the European Higher Education Area, is no exception as it too aspires to have a world-class…

Policy texts present problems, propose solutions to those problems and persuade multiple audiences of the legitimacy of the proposed problems and solutions. The rhetorical analysis of two decades of higher education and science and technology discourse in Finland, Germany, UK, Portugal and USA highlights the discursive elements that contribute to…

Since the 1990s, there have been more than 400 cases of university mergers in China, representing various types and involving 1000 public institutions. While China has provided good and abundant cases for studies on university mergers, such an opportunity has not yet been fully exploited by international scholars of university merger research.…

This article presents an analysis of the mergers in the Danish Higher Education (HE)-sector with a particular emphasis on the 2007 mergers involving universities and Government Research Institutes (GRIs). Furthermore, it follows the post-merger processes up to 2014/2015 at two Danish universities and examines the consequences of the changes seen…

Despite a burgeoning body of empirical research on "the international student experience", the area remains under-theorized. The literature to date lacks a guiding conceptual model that captures the adjustment and adaptation trajectories of this unique, growing, and important sojourner group. In this paper, we therefore put forward a…

Nowadays, assessment is widely recognized as a key element in higher education systems. Current studies are moving towards the revision of traditional modalities of testing, the individuation of alternative forms of assessment, and, above all, the analysis of conceptions that teachers and students have about assessment. The present research is…

Globally, debates on the notion of a third set of activities aimed at linking higher education institutions more closely with surrounding society are not new. In the last decade or so, calls for a re-engagement of the university in helping to tackle the great challenges facing societies and local communities have propelled the third mission to the…

Twentieth-century "massification" of higher education and academic research led to mission diversification and structural diversification of national higher education systems (HESs), but also a tendency of non-university colleges to seek to develop into full-scale universities by the emulation of practices of established academic…

Socio-culturally formed collegial contexts in the midlevel of higher education organizations have attracted increased attention from higher education researchers. It is assumed that development, change and stability are dependent on norms, habits and traditions in these contexts. This text introduces a framework useful for identifying and…