This paper examines how cultural values of power distance and uncertainty avoidance influence students' identities and receptivity toward global competence (GC). We developed identity grafting (IG) theory and measures to study these processes, characterizing them in diverse and manageable ways: blending, balancing, reversing, and repressing identity formations involved in negotiating differences. We collected data from 556 university students in Hong Kong to identify attributes and processes that influence their GC receptivity toward intercultural communication, perspective taking, and adaptability. Structural equation modeling revealed that power distance had direct negative associations with blending and GC. Students with higher power distance tended to use reversing IG, but this did not significantly affect their GC receptivity. By contrast, GC receptivity was positively associated with blending, followed by balancing. However, students with higher uncertainty avoidance were more inclined toward balancing than blending, and uncertainty avoidance positively influenced GC receptivity. Calculating the total effects, balancing supported students' GC more than blending. Significantly, GC receptivity was positively associated with repressing. The findings underscore the need to sharpen the conceptual tools of current GC approaches, differentiate between power-distance values and reversing responses, and consider uncertainty-avoidance values when deciding whether to promote blending or balancing. While existing GC approaches support those inclined toward blending identities, they also promote identity repression. Instead of telling students what they need to manifest to be globally competent, we can use IG to support students in negotiating such ethical dilemmas, equipping them with tools to make informed decisions about how to live with diversity.
University rankings persist despite contested metrics, the problematic incentives they generate, and the strategic gaming they invite - dynamics that should undermine their claim to measuring excellence, deter participation, and ultimately erode the rankings themselves. This study addresses such persistence by reconceptualizing rankings as cycles of gaming and counter-gaming in which rankers and universities interactively reproduce what counts as excellence. We argue that these cycles are sustained through reciprocal decoupling: rankers inevitably decouple metrics from the myth of excellence, which helps maintain university participation, while universities game by decoupling their reporting practices from those metrics to generate strategically amplified signals of excellence. In response, rankers counter-game to reclaim jurisdiction and constrain strategic representations of excellence by ostensibly realigning metrics with the myth. Using longitudinal data from the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE-WUR), we empirically trace gaming and counter-gaming across 2016-2025. Given THE-WUR's reliance on evaluative pillars that allowed varying reporting discretion, many universities developed concentrated performance profiles in the most elastic pillars - where greater discretion allows short-term leverage - consistent with gaming, whereas higher scores in less elastic pillars were associated with more balanced profiles. THE-WUR counter-gamed in 2024 by reformulating its pillars, weakening the link between pillar scores and concentration while contributing to substantial rank declines among universities with higher pre-reform concentration. The findings point that rankings endure not simply as external impositions but as evolving interaction orders maintained through cycles of gaming and counter-gaming that reproduce the tensions between the myth of excellence, metrics, and reporting practices.
International student mobility offers considerable economic benefits to host countries, yet it is increasingly challenged by shifting policies on funding, migration, and tuition fees. To inform strategies aimed at maximizing these benefits, this paper investigates the determinants of international students' institutional choices and their decisions to remain in the host country post-graduation. We conduct two Discrete Choice Experiments, enriched with detailed demographic information. We find that tuition fees are the most important determinant of university choice. Moreover, our results suggest that international students are willing to forego up to & euro;8597 in annual tuition fees to attend a higher ranked university. For post-graduation decisions, easing immigration hurdles increases the probability of staying by 11.62 to 23.99 percentage points. Next, we show substantial preference heterogeneity across different student groups. The stay intention is 9 percentage points higher among visa-requiring students and between 4.6 and 6.2 percentage points higher among students with their own income source, suggesting that integration mechanisms may strengthen willingness to stay. These findings provide actionable insights for policymakers seeking to design targeted strategies to attract and retain international talent.
This qualitative multiple-case study investigates factors constraining faculty collaboration in Ethiopia's resource-constrained, politically sensitive public higher education. Through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and policy analysis across two universities, the research reveals a profound value-action gap. While collaboration is widely valued intellectually, its practice is hindered by a cascading system of constraints, such as de-professionalising economic precarity, demotivating national policies, and a socio-political climate of fear and ethnic fragmentation that erodes trust. Institutionally, scarce funding and punitive bureaucracy render supportive policies merely symbolic. These macro-forces fuel opportunistic behaviors and erode relational equity within teams. The study theorizes this configuration as a crisis of symbolic organizational learning and a failure to convert latent bonding capital into professional academic capital. I argue that conventional institutional levers are futile without first addressing foundational issues of economic dignity and political security. The findings contribute a contextualized model of constraint, highlighting how universal barriers are intensified and reconfigured within specific socio-political ecologies, offering critical insights for policymakers in similar resource-constrained environments.
A substantial body of literature highlights the existence of persistent gender gaps in academia, where women are underrepresented in senior positions and experience slower career progression than men. Among the factors contributing to these disparities, the motherhood penalty is frequently cited. However, less is known about how gender disparities unfold across successive stages of the academic career, at which transitions they become most salient, and whether the role of parenthood in career advancement varies by gender and career stage.Drawing on original retrospective data that reconstruct the career and fertility histories of a large sample of Italian academics, this study examines gender differences throughout academic career progression, from entry into early academic positions to promotion to full professorship.Using Cox proportional hazards models, we find no significant gender difference in the transition from PhD completion to non-tenure-track assistant professorship. A pronounced gender gap emerges, however, in subsequent transitions, with women experiencing significantly longer waiting times than men. This disparity persists after accounting for parenthood, second births, scholarly productivity, and other covariates. For women, childbearing does not significantly shape career advancement. By contrast, fatherhood has a dual effect: the birth of a first child is associated with faster progression to more advanced academic positions, whereas a second child is associated with slower early-career progression but faster advancement at later stages. These findings highlight the enduring career disadvantages experienced by women and the gendered implications of parenthood in academia.
In the field of higher education, the strong correlation between teacher strategies and student engagement has been widely acknowledged. However, existing research has not yet provided comprehensive and nuanced evidence to fully elucidate the dynamics and complexity of this relationship. To address this gap, this study employed a mixed-methods approach, combining interviews with 30 university teachers and students with a survey of 3,819 undergraduates across four higher education institutions. This study identifies six effective teacher strategies that promote student engagement, namely selecting relevant teaching materials; adopting nontraditional teaching models; designing distributed course assessments; delivering clear expositions of knowledge; promoting meaningful classroom interactions; and attending to students' learning status and needs. This study reveals that excessive use of technology is the direct cause of the ineffectiveness of teacher strategies (except for attending to students' learning), while teacher care is a latent factor for sustaining the effectiveness of teaching strategies. As a caring teacher strategy, attending to and responding to students' learning status and needs not only has a great impact on students' learning engagement but also enhances the effectiveness of other strategies. These findings underscore the critical importance of instructors actively monitoring students' learning states and responding promptly and appropriately to their evolving needs within real-world teaching contexts. Moreover, this study not only provides new insights into the relationship between teacher strategies and student engagement but also offers more targeted recommendations for college educators to improve teaching quality in complex educational contexts.
This study explores how Turkish foundation universities construct their organizational actorhood within a higher education (HE) system that combines strong regulatory control with increasing market orientation. Drawing on document analysis of 29 current strategic plans, the study integrates three complementary theoretical perspectives of governmentality, organizationality, and resilient actorhood to conceptualize varying degrees of organizational actorhood. The findings indicate that most institutions reproduce a demand-absorbing identity, emphasizing teaching and market responsiveness over research or societal engagement. While strategic plans frequently express ambitions for innovation and internationalization, these remain largely ceremonial, lacking concrete mechanisms, resource allocation, and measurable outcomes. Only a small number of universities exhibit mission-oriented differentiation, particularly in health, aviation, and engineering-related fields. The analysis reveals a structural dual dependency on state regulation and market pressures, which constrains institutional autonomy and reduces organizational diversity. The paper concludes by proposing an analytical typology of three ideal types of organizational actorhood (ceremonial, instrumental, and strategic) for understanding limited differentiation in hybrid systems.
This article analyzes how program and department heads navigated a prolonged crisis using the Garbage Can model and institutional theory. Based on 27 semi-structured interviews triangulated with regulatory and institutional documents, organized anarchy prevailed initially: ambiguous preferences, fluid participation, unclear work technologies, contingent problem solution couplings, and outcomes of oversight or flight. Later, responses stabilized through legitimacy seeking and coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism: routines sustained operations, reduced managerial load, and signaled alignment with the field. The contribution is a phased synthesis: the Garbage Can lens captures confusion and heightened pressure; the institutional lens acts as a quiet stabilizer that eases strain. Together, they clarify how shock-driven improvisation evolves into field-aligned consolidation, advancing understanding of crisis management in higher education. The study advances a temporal handoff account: shock-driven improvised couplings are replaced by field filtering and routinized, legitimacy-seeking scripts that regulate managerial attention.
Growth mindsets, or the belief that abilities could improve through effort and strategies, have been extensively studied in K-12 education, where they have been found to be positively associated with academic development. However, their application in doctoral education, a more complex and autonomous learning context, has received limited attention. This represents an important gap, as doctoral students are not only expected to master existing knowledge but also to produce new knowledge under considerable intellectual and emotional demands. To address this gap, we adopted an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design to examine how growth mindsets related to doctoral students' research development. Study 1 used a quantitative approach, involving surveys with 379 students. We found that stronger growth mindsets were associated with higher research skills, self-efficacy, productivity, and satisfaction, and these associations were consistent across gender, discipline, study phase, and socioeconomic background. Study 2 used a qualitative approach involving interviews with 18 students. The qualitative findings broadly corroborated the quantitative results and surfaced new themes, including the key roles of adaptive motivation and self-regulated learning in explaining how growth mindsets contribute to research development. Furthermore, supervisor and peer support were also important in supporting students' growth mindsets. These findings underscore the value of fostering growth mindsets to support doctoral students' research development amid an increasingly demanding academic landscape.
This article explores the barriers to an equitable transition from secondary to higher education. Taking our home institution of Newcastle University as a case study, we consider the relationship of the 'hidden curriculum' of higher education in the United Kingdom with the sector-wide neoliberalisation of education, arguing that a governmental emphasis on the so-called 'knowledge economy' has had an ongoing impact on students' experience of the transition to university. This has resulted in new barriers to the equality, diversity and inclusion agendas. We argue that, in the post-pandemic landscape, there remains the need for a university-wide pedagogy which approaches the student life cycle holistically. This encompasses pre-arrival to induction through to continuation at university. Overall, we highlight the urgency of cross-sector dialogue so that UK higher education institutions can respond to shifts in secondary educational policy; this, in turn, will help students to leave behind knowledge-based settings for those which are driven by critical enquiry.
Generative AI is now common in higher education, and its rise prompts questions about how students shape their own learning, including the cognitive effort involved. Rather than assuming a binary debate between cheating and assistance, we examine perceived Human-AI agency, understood empirically as students' reported initiative, monitoring of AI outputs and final decision making in AI supported learning. We also examine whether reflection is associated with self-reported critical thinking across UK and China based higher education contexts. We used a comparative quantitative design and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyse data from university students in the UK (n = 145) and China (n = 164). Both groups showed a similar pattern, where perceived human-AI agency was positively associated with reflective engagement, which subsequently was associated with self-reported critical thinking. However, some sample specific contextual patterns were observed in self-reported psychological outcomes. We found that UK students who reflected on their learning reported stronger academic self-concept, whereas this effect was non-significant in Chinese students' responses. Furthermore, AI literacy was modeled as a moderator for Chinese students, with higher literacy associated with variation in the agency reflection relationship. These findings theorize an agency gap, suggesting that suggesting that students who report retaining decision making power when using AI also tend to report stronger reflective engagement and self-reported critical thinking. The findings point to the importance of context sensitive pedagogical strategies, while recognizing that cultural values, nationality, ethnicity, institutional policy, tool availability and educational socialization were not directly measured.
Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) seeks to guarantee the right to education in the mother tongue while strengthening cultural identity and social inclusion in indigenous contexts. Although IBE has expanded in Latin America, empirical evidence on how teacher education programs operate within Amazonian Indigenous communities remains limited. This study examines the teacher education experiences of Awajun and Wampis students enrolled in early childhood, primary, and secondary education programs in the Amazonas region of Peru, a population that has been underrepresented in previous research. Using an interpretivist qualitative design and reflective thematic analysis with a primarily experiential and semantic orientation, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 pre-service teachers from Indigenous communities and three teacher educators involved in intercultural bilingual teacher education. The findings indicate that participants describe bilingual intercultural competencies as extending beyond linguistic skills to encompass cultural responsibility, community engagement, and resilience. Participants also report that, while pedagogical practices promote the integration of ancestral knowledge, these processes are perceived as constrained by limited methodological innovation, persistent challenges in Spanish pronunciation and academic writing, and experiences of ethnic and linguistic discrimination. This study provides context-specific empirical evidence on teacher education in IBE within Awajun and Wampis contexts and conceptualizes teacher education as a formative space where linguistic development, cultural continuity, and institutional inequalities become intertwined. In doing so, it offers a more integrated understanding of how intercultural competencies are shaped within structurally constrained Indigenous higher education settings.
This article argues that a new ideological-punitive regime is reshaping higher education governance by combining market instruments with increasingly coercive, identity-driven State interventions. It asks how a new ideological-punitive regime is reshaping higher education governance beyond neoliberal market logics, and through which convergent and divergent mechanisms this occurs across national systems. It draws on a qualitative comparative analysis of eight cases-Argentina, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, Poland, Spain/Madrid, and the United States-based on official policy documents, Scholars at Risk reports, and verifiable high-quality journalistic sources. Drawing on theories of hegemony, agenda control, and State power, it develops a framework explaining how coercive, organisational, and symbolic mechanisms recalibrate the balance between consent and coercion within universities. These mechanisms weaken collegial governance, erode peer review, and generate chilling effects that reconfigure academic work, institutional autonomy, and international collaboration. The findings show that contemporary interventions exceed the logic of neoliberal market governance, forming a hybrid order-neoliberalism-plus-in which metrics and competition persist but become subordinated to identity agendas and tests of cultural orthodoxy. By clarifying how punitive repertoires operate and circulate across contexts, the article contributes to scholarship on institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and the political economy of knowledge. It concludes by outlining strategies to strengthen organisational resilience and safeguard universities as critical, democratic, and globally connected public institutions. Este art & iacute;culo sostiene que un nuevo r & eacute;gimen ideol & oacute;gico-punitivo est & aacute; reconfigurando el gobierno de la educaci & oacute;n superior mediante la combinaci & oacute;n de instrumentos de mercado con intervenciones estatales cada vez m & aacute;s coercitivas e impulsadas por agendas identitarias. Se pregunta c & oacute;mo este nuevo r & eacute;gimen ideol & oacute;gico-punitivo est & aacute; transformando el gobierno de la educaci & oacute;n superior m & aacute;s all & aacute; de las l & oacute;gicas de mercado neoliberales, y a trav & eacute;s de qu & eacute; mecanismos convergentes y divergentes ocurre esto en distintos sistemas nacionales. El an & aacute;lisis se apoya en una comparaci & oacute;n cualitativa de ocho casos -Argentina, Brasil, Hungr & iacute;a, India, Israel, Polonia, Espa & ntilde;a/Madrid y Estados Unidos- a partir de documentos oficiales, informes de Scholars at Risk y fuentes period & iacute;sticas verificables de alta calidad. A partir de las teor & iacute;as de la hegemon & iacute;a, control de la agendas, asi como de Estado y poder, el art & iacute;culo desarrolla un marco explicativo sobre c & oacute;mo los mecanismos coercitivos, organizacionales y simb & oacute;licos redefinen el equilibrio entre el consenso y la coerci & oacute;n al interior de las universidades. Estos mecanismos debilitan el gobierno colegiado, erosionan la evaluaci & oacute;n por pares y generan efectos inhibidores que reconfiguran el trabajo acad & eacute;mico, la autonom & iacute;a institucional y la colaboraci & oacute;n internacional. Los hallazgos muestran que las intervenciones contempor & aacute;neas exceden la l & oacute;gica del gobierno de mercado neoliberal, configurando un orden h & iacute;brido -neoliberalismo-plus- en el que las m & eacute;tricas y la competencia persisten, pero quedan subordinadas a agendas identitarias y pruebas de ortodoxia cultural. Al clarificar c & oacute;mo los repertorios punitivos operan y circulan entre contextos, el art & iacute;culo contribuye a la literatura especializada sobre autonom & iacute;a institucional, libertad acad & eacute;mica y econom & iacute;a pol & iacute;tica del conocimiento. Concluye esbozando estrategias para fortalecer la resiliencia organizacional y salvaguardar las universidades como instituciones p & uacute;blicas cr & iacute;ticas, democr & aacute;ticas y conectadas globalmente.
