Amid calls for greater efficiency, public research universities in the U.S. have increasingly adopted Responsibility Center Management (RCM), a decentralized budget model granting greater fiscal autonomy and responsibility to individual academic units. This study examines the implications of budget decentralization for the salaries and employment of faculty. Results from event study analysis indicate that RCM is positively associated with average faculty salaries across academic ranks. A positive association is found with the number of assistant professors, alongside a compositional shift toward assistant professors and away from full professors. These findings suggest that budget decentralization is correlated with responses that are consistent with both prestige-seeking and fiscally conservative behavior.
Internationalisation research overwhelmingly adopts the nation‑state as its analytical frame, leaving the dynamics of global cities—where internationalisation pressures are most concentrated—largely unexplored. This study advances a city‑based diagnostic of higher education internationalisation by re‑specifying Porter’s Diamond Model into Diamond 2.0. Although the Diamond has been systematically applied to higher education only twice (Curran 2000, 2001), its systemic architecture offers a valuable foundation for analysing the multi‑factor pressures shaping global‑city ecosystems. Rather than endorsing competitiveness, the study treats it nuancedly as an empirical condition implicit in mobility, research collaboration, and global positioning. Drawing on policy documents, institutional strategies, and international datasets, the analysis examines New York, Tokyo, Singapore, London, and Hong Kong through a structured, multi‑stage coding procedure that generates mechanism‑level keywords, keyword chains, and five urban archetypes. Findings show that internationalisation in global cities evolves through contradiction‑structured evolution: abundance produces stratification, reform produces precarity, autonomy produces dependency, prestige produces volatility, and integration produces contestation. Diamond 2.0 reframes determinants as tension‑bearing mechanisms and integrates canonical critiques of stratification, risk, dependency, governance hybridity, and sovereignty. The framework offers a city‑oriented, competitiveness‑diagnostic and structuring device for understanding how achievements and fragilities co‑produce global‑city higher education. It also functions as an early‑warning architecture for identifying harmful competitive dynamics and guiding resilience‑oriented governance, with boundary conditions for future Global South applications.
As transnational higher education expands, international branch campuses (IBCs) have become key sites where global, national, and local academic logics intersect. However, limited research has explored how early career academics (ECAs) construct their academic identities within these hybrid institutions. Drawing on the concept of global-national-local imbrications, this study comparatively examines the academic identity formation of Chinese and international ECAs working in an IBC in China. Findings show that the IBC generated shared uncertainty, but it positioned the two groups differently: Chinese ECAs more often negotiated dual legitimacy across global and domestic arenas, whereas international ECAs drew legitimacy from their international status but faced greater challenges in becoming locally recognized and connected. In response, Chinese ECAs adopted amphibious strategies to balance these demands, while international ECAs relied more on peer networks to navigate local constraints and sustain their early-career trajectories. These practices reflect the agentive and relational nature of academic identity formation and highlight the need for more inclusive institutional support.
Following the systematic ban on female higher education in Afghanistan, volunteer-run online institutions have emerged as a critical form of educational resistance and a lifeline for marginalized learners. This study explores the lived experiences of academic staff at a prominent online higher education center, examining their motivations, professional opportunities, and the formidable challenges they navigate. Guided by Self-Determination Theory and employing a critical narrative inquiry, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 40 instructors, both residing within Afghanistan and across the global diaspora, and analyzed the data through thematic analysis. The findings demonstrate that educators are driven by deep intrinsic motivations, including a profound sense of social responsibility to empower girls, a desire for community connection, and the pursuit of skill acquisition. Despite encountering severe challenges such as security threats, frequent power outages, unstable internet, and significant work-life imbalance, these “academic activists” cultivated an environment offering opportunities for professional development, research, and international networking. Furthermore, the study highlights how the issuance of employment verification letters and the opportunity to host webinars help instructors build a professional identity through human rights work. Considering the fragile ecosystem in which these educators operate, there is an urgent need for targeted international support, infrastructure development, and strategic partnerships to ensure the long-term sustainability of this vital educational lifeline.
This study investigates how future learning centers (FLCs) in higher education can advance student development through a co-intelligence framework integrating distributed cognition theory and human-AI collaboration. The proposed 3 C Model-centered on triadic Collaboration (students-teachers-intelligent agents), supported by Curriculum-activity systems, and embedded in Contextual blended environments—addresses a critical gap in existing research: the overemphasis on spatial/resource design (termed “librarianization”) in FLC studies, with insufficient focus on systemic student development models for the AI era. Using comparative case analysis of Tongji University (China) and Oregon State University (OSU, U.S.), we identify two complementary implementation pathways: classroom-level deep technology integration (Tongji) and institutional-wide ecosystem construction (OSU). Findings demonstrate that AI functions as a collaborative partner rather than a mere tool: Tongji’s AI-enabled “Future Classroom” improved student project feasibility (via real-time simulation), while OSU’s spatial-technological ecosystem boosted interdisciplinary collaboration among engineering students. The model reshapes teacher roles (from knowledge transmitters to “cognitive architects”), curricula (toward interdisciplinary “AI + X” modules), and assessment (from knowledge recall to innovation-driven competencies). This research contributes a theoretically grounded, empirically validated framework for higher education digital transformation, offering scalable guidance for cultivating innovative talents via cloud-based AI tools or through public-private partnership for infrastructure in the future learning centers.
A puzzle for neoliberal reformers in higher education is that regardless of the extent to which systems are remade along neoliberal lines, the outcomes are less transformative than expected. This is because neoliberal competition is articulated by a deeply-ingrained social relation peculiar to higher education: status (prestige) oriented comparison and vertical ordering. Relations between institutions within society are framed by status competition. Status goals permeate the elite sub-sector and shape the middle tiers as the impact of university ranking has shown. Only low status institutions are demand responsive and efficiency driven as imagined by neoliberalism. Yet leading universities have adjusted to meritocratic neoliberalism better than this suggests, drawing on market competition as a legitimating device while building cumulative advantage within it. The neoliberal university market articulates the status order while also being negated by it. The paper focuses on higher education in the Anglosphere. After theorising the dynamics of status competition it tracks the transition from neoliberal regulation and global rankings to post neoliberalism, in which some governments have become impatient with the primacy of status logic over economic logic, and the populist far-right has directly challenged the status of leading universities. Whether this will weaken the determining role of status remains to be seen.
International postdoctoral researchers represent a distinctive cohort within global academic migration, characterised by their temporary appointments and transitional career phase. While extant literature has examined international postdocs primarily in traditional academic destinations, the experiences of those in non-traditional destinations such as China remain comparatively understudied. Addressing this gap, this study investigates the motivations and decision-making processes of 28 international scholars who took up postdoctoral positions at Chinese universities. It develops an integrated analytical framework that combines push–pull factors with three core dimensions of postdoctoral career development—professional security, professional growth, and career outlook. By analysing the relative strength of push and pull factors across these dimensions, the study identifies four distinctive decision-making patterns: academic stepping stones, attraction-led, second-best optimisation, and serendipitous mobility. By revealing the diverse and strategic calculations driving international postdoctoral mobility to China, these findings nuance traditional core–periphery conceptualisations of academic migration and advance our understanding of these scholars’ dynamic career trajectories in an increasingly multipolar academic landscape.
