This article critically assesses the alignment between Morocco’s public guidance schemes for international students and its national development goals. Specifically, it investigates the capacity of these mechanisms to transform student mobility from a potential ‘brain drain’ into a tangible ‘brain gain’. Employing a qualitative case study approach, we conducted a systematic content analysis of 204 mobility programmes and scholarships promoted by the Ministry of Higher Education (2019–2022). These data were triangulated with semi-structured interviews with three key institutional stakeholders, selected through purposive sampling and analysed until theoretical saturation was achieved. The analysis reveals three structural weaknesses in the current policy framework: (1) a passive incentive strategy that focuses almost exclusively on funding while remaining disconnected from national skill shortages; (2) a ‘missing link’ regarding student support during the study-abroad period; and (3) a complete absence of institutional mechanisms for attracting and reintegrating graduates upon completion of their studies. Empirically, this study provides the first systematic mapping of Morocco’s outbound mobility arrangements. Theoretically, it proposes a three-phase analytical model—departure, sojourn, return—demonstrating how flawed career guidance policies can inadvertently institutionalise a passive brain drain pattern even when political discourse explicitly favours circular migration and human capital retention. The paper concludes with concrete recommendations for reframing Moroccan guidance policy and identifies the limits of guidance as a sovereign tool given the structural leverage held by destination countries.
This article examines professors from six academic disciplines at German universities as policy-relevant actors and investigates how political and party-political attitudes relate to their willingness to engage at the science–policy interface. Drawing on original survey data, we analyze professors’ preferences for direct cooperation with political actors using ordinary least squares regression models. We situate professors’ engagement within changing institutional expectations, the “mission dilemma” arising from expanding tasks beyond research and teaching, and the potential risk of politicization. Contrary to our initial expectations, most hypothesized relationships are not supported. Neither ideological orientation nor sympathy for specific political parties is significantly associated with professors’ willingness to cooperate with political actors. Political interest and cultural capital emerge as relevant factors. Overall, our findings challenge common assumptions about the relationship between professors’ political attitudes and their willingness to engage in policy advice in Germany.
Research management and administration (RMA) has professionalized rapidly into a distinct domain of higher-education governance, yet its scholarship remains overwhelmingly anchored in the global North and, where it turns to Africa, tends to treat the continent as a single administrative space. This article argues that such treatment obscures a consequential structural feature: the colonial language divide that partitions African higher education into anglophone and francophone administrative worlds, each with distinct legal families, funding geographies, supranational governance architectures and languages of science. The paper re-conceptualizes the divide as an institutional variable, grounded in the mechanisms of path dependence and transaction cost, and shows how it structures the research management lifecycle from funder access and contracting to financial compliance, ethics regulation, professional recognition and impact assessment. It then tests the argument against original data. Official framework-program participation, once normalized for research system size, shows no francophone funding penalty—the apparent volume gap is an artifact of size, and francophone systems in fact convert research output into grants somewhat more efficiently. The divide’s measurable footprint lies instead in the language of knowledge, where francophone output is far less visible in English-indexed metrics, and in collaboration, where cross-bloc co-authorship is roughly an order of magnitude rarer than within-bloc partnering. The paper concludes by deriving an institutional design response: a bilingual, bridging architecture, led by regional associations that lowers the cost of crossing the divide without pretending to abolish it.
The operating environment of higher education in the twenty-first century is undergoing rapid change. Public universities are in an imagination crisis, searching for alternative roles in the knowledge-based economy. To find the right actions at the right time, many universities have begun to incorporate foresight into their strategic thinking processes. This study investigates foresight practices in public universities through the lens of futures research, an interdisciplinary field concerned with the systematic study of possible, probable, and preferable futures. It begins by addressing key environmental tensions that shape the strategic challenges faced by public universities today, exploring how foresight and futures thinking contribute to the strategic capacity of these institutions, and reflecting on what can be learned from current foresight practices in public universities. Our findings suggest that foresight approaches are of significant assistance to public universities in identifying alternative futures, preparing for environmental changes, and capitalising on market-driven opportunities. Nevertheless, university foresight remains conservative and reinforces the traditional roles of universities in education and research. We recommend pursuing participatory and continuous foresight to capture novel potentials and stretching the temporal aspects of strategic thinking to enable more ambitious, long-term, and transformative roles for public universities in society.
This paper examines the association between the disciplinary composition of international students and the prevailing logic of university internationalization in the given country in historical perspective. It uses an original longitudinal dataset compiled from archival records and administrative statistics across several benchmark points from the mid-1970s to 2024, to analyse the disciplinary structure of international student enrolment at Soviet and Russian universities across four historical periods, each characterized by a distinct combination of political, market, and administrative logics. It is shown that the association between disciplinary composition and prevailing governance logic operates through two mechanisms: recruitment instruments that define or constrain field of study choices for state-funded students, and country of origin composition that generates disciplinary demand patterns among students attracted through market mechanisms. Findings demonstrate that longitudinal monitoring of disciplinary distribution provides a deeper understanding of how internationalization policies function in practice than total enrolment numbers alone.
