The purpose of this conceptual paper is to engage with the idea of criticality, specifically as performed by higher education researchers that espouse a critical quantitative approach. We contend there are many inherent hazards, ethical commitments, and contradictions that come with engaging in critical quantitative inquiry. Chief among the hazards and contradictions is the outright foreclosure of criticality as theorized by the very foundational principles cited in the extant conceptualizations of critical quantitative inquiry. To date, and as we will demonstrate through our review of relevant research, critical quantitative inquiry in education has largely failed to establish these recognitions. After examining the primary works on the topic, we offer a discussion of ways to recapture some of the positive potential we find in the early writings on critical quantitative inquiry.

This paper explores Christianity's ambiguous relationship to capitalism by engaging Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities as a way of rethinking Marxism's critique of religion from the standpoint of political economy. Following Etienne Balibar's distinction between the theory of ideology and Capital's theory of fetishism, I examine how the later Marx conceived of religion as socially conditioned by the society of commodity production, which takes on religious dimensions. Commodities are the basis for a concept of fetishism which commands total subjection, alienating human beings under capitalism. This critical focus also reveals Christianity in its totalizing role as a symbolic structure shaped by the inescapable logic of exchange-value, money, and universal equivalents. Nonetheless, Christianity retains the impetus to anti-fetishism, provided it unites with the Marxist science of critical perception. This anti-fetishistic union focuses on the transparent and revolutionized social relations of real presence as the nonalienated reverse of fetishism's false presence. A critical apophaticism, tempered by the materialist amendments of Marika Rose and Slavoj Zizek, offers the bridge to such a union and highlights the anti-fetishistic avenues of failure and utopia.

Contemporary models of academic work reflect a process of compression given that busy (time compression), jet setting (space compression) scholars constitute the norm of academic success. Valuable reflections from mobile academics are available, and yet, such narratives are often confined to individual voices and perspectives. In this paper, we endeavor to present a collaborative analysis of our shared experience as short-term foreign experts at a Chinese Normal University, simultaneously embracing and being troubled by our institutional and individual desires to become global. Throughout our analysis, we focus on the contrasts of our national, racial and class identities of origin and those we enacted while teaching in China. In doing so, we pay attention to the literal and metaphorical meaning of mobility. Our project explores ways in which mobility is(n't) always privileged, as well as whether and how we experience time - space compression contrasting our class, race, nationality and sexual orientation differences.

Framed conceptually by gender equity, gender homophily, the contest regime of blind peer-review publishing, and the gendered nature of the quantitative-qualitative debate, this study investigated the intersection of authorship, gender, and methodological characteristics of 408 articles published from 2006 to 2010 in 3 major higher education journals. Nonbinary coding of author gender based on pronouns identified via Web searches virtually eliminated missing data and likely reduced error. Results suggest movement toward gender parity over time; however, women's representation among authors does not appear commensurate with representation in the field. Findings revealed gendered use of research methods, with qualitative articles more likely to be first-authored by women and quantitative articles more likely to be first-authored by men. Nevertheless, articles first-authored by both women and men were more likely to use quantitative than qualitative methods. Quantitative research, more so than qualitative research, appears to be a site of cogender collaboration, which has increased over time. This portrait of the intersection of authorship, gender, and research methods provides an empirical foundation for discussion and inquiry about gender and scholarship in the field, and the results of our study are generative for future research.

Once considered an “atheoretical community of practice,” the field of higher education appears to be shifting to prioritize an explicit engagement with theory. This special issue aims to strengthen the forces supporting that shift by providing discussions of topics that are familiar to higher education scholars and practitioners—online education (Selznick & Schafer), race and affirmative action in college admissions (Ward and Baez & Sanchez), student debt (Gildersleeve), student development theory (Smithers & Eaton), and faculty work and educational research (Kuntz)—in new and theoretically rich ways. In what I found to be a series of important, challenging, and at times conflicting arguments, articles in this special issue demonstrate the significance of theoretical engagements as scholars and practitioners attempt to understand and respond to contemporary issues in the field.

ABSTRACT In this article, the notion of excellence in relation to teaching is removed from its privileged place in order to render it, and its implications, for analysis. We argue that teaching excellence needs to be understood in the larger context of the neoliberal university in which competition is taken for granted, and therefore, metrics for comparison are evermore necessary. Following this argument, we explore excellence as an instrument of neoliberal ideology in higher education. We explore different manifestations of teaching excellence enacted in policies that that are illustrative of five different countries. Implications for further analysis, and for resistance to the expansion of neoliberal ideology through teaching excellence, are presented.

This longitudinal study investigates changes in the extent to which students express or reject a customer orientation towards their education from their initial summer orientation to the end of their second year in college. Fifteen of the 19 items associated with a customer orientation included in the survey (N=3885, n=1085, RR= 28%) exhibited statistically significant changes, all in ways consistent with a greater expression of a customer approach. Results also indicated that while students increasingly expressed a customer orientation, overall, they continued not to express beliefs consistent with a customer approach. Implications are discussed within the framework of neoliberal ideology.

In this article, we explore commodities and consumption, two concepts that are central to critiques of the neoliberal university. By engaging with these concepts, we explore the limits of neoliberal logic. We ground this conceptual entanglement in Marxist and post-Marxist traditions given our understanding of neoliberalism both as an extension of and as a meaningfully different form of capitalism. As colleges and universities enact neoliberal economic assumptions by focusing on revenue generation, understanding students as customers, and construing their faculty as temporary service providers, the terms commodity and consumption have become commonplace in critical higher education literature. When critiques concerning the commodification and consumption of higher education are connected with these theoretical and conceptual foundations, they not only become more effective but also provide a more meaningful guide upon which current and future scholars can build.

Previous research has found the field of higher education, particularly in the United States, is dominated by functionalist approaches, a preponderance of survey data, and the ubiquitous use of advanced quantitative methods to investigate educational phenomena. This descriptive study aims to illuminate why the field is constructed in this way. Given that researchers have found doctoral education to influence the way scholars think about, conduct and disseminate their research, we explore the educational histories of published authors in the field with the belief that examining the distribution of institutional affiliations among authors may shed light on the dominance of particular approaches to knowledge production within the field. Specifically, we examined doctoral institutional affiliations of authors published in three top-tier higher education journals in the United States from 2006 to 2010. Our analysis illuminates that knowledge produced in the field of higher education is highly concentrated among both authors and particular institutions. Our findings raise important questions about the social processes governing knowledge generation within the field - including questions about the extent to which such concentration is or is not desirable.

This study replicates and extends a 2004 content analysis of three major higher education journals. The original study examined the methodological characteristics of all published research in these journals from 1996 to 2000, recommending that higher education programs adjust their graduate training to better match the heavily quantitative and statistically sophisticated journal content. We examine the same journals' content from 2006 to 2010 one decade later through the lens of knowledge production in higher education, and explore the ways that dominant modes of research may legitimize and/or delegitimize various forms of inquiry. Our findings reveal afield that continues to be dominated by quantitative methods and which is increasingly using more advanced statistical techniques. We discuss the tensions of a field more aligned with federal and state priorities and therefore better positioned to influence policy, but with a concomitantly contracted scope of and approach to inquiry. We also discuss implications for the training of graduate students, professionals, and policymakers as well as implications for publishing and researching other aspects of knowledge production in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the commonsensical acceptance of commitments to excellence within postsecondary education and reveal their inherent neoliberal foundation. Because excellence appears neutral, natural, universal, and a legitimate educational goal, it obfuscates the embedded assumptions that undergird the material practices associated with performances of excellence. These assumptions include the quantification and commensurability of learning, teaching, and scholarship, the necessity of assessment and legitimation of accountability regimes, and the naturalness and universality of competition within postsecondary education. The acceptance of excellence as an organizing frame of the university has enabled much of the neoliberalization of postsecondary education in the United States, and as such, to resist the neoliberalization of postsecondary education, we much challenge its commitment to excellence.

journals. The original study examined the methodological characteristics of all published research in these journals from 1996 to 2000, recommending that higher education programs adjust their graduate training to better match the heavily quantitative and statistically sophisticated journal content. We examine the same journals’ content from 2006 to 2010—one decade later—through the lens of knowledge production in higher education, and explore the ways that dominant modes of research may legitimize and/or delegitimize various forms of inquiry. Our findings reveal a field that continues to be dominated by quantitative methods and which is increasingly using more advanced statistical techniques. We discuss the tensions of a field more aligned with federal and state priorities and therefore better positioned to influence policy, but with a concomitantly contracted scope of and approach to inquiry. We also discuss implications for the training of graduate students, professionals, and policymakers as well as implications for publishing and researching other aspects of knowledge production in higher education.

While a number of scholars have discussed the pervasiveness of the conceptualization of students as customers, to date there has been limited reliable research examining the extent to which students actually view themselves as customers. Using a survey that was administered to a census of entering first-year students at a large public research university (59.8% response rate), this study shows that students do not agree with many of the educational beliefs and planned behaviors associated with a customer orientation. Results of exploratory factor analysis suggested only 28.9% of respondents expressed a customer orientation. These results show that contrary to what has become common sense in postsecondary education, most students at this public university do not express a customer orientation towards their education. Such findings should make scholars and practitioners rethink some of their embedded assumptions with regards to the goals, motivations, and general educational orientations of today's college students.

This article provides a synthesis of literature on the conceptualization of students as customers and connects the rise of this understanding of students to the expansion of free-market logic into higher education. It details the ways in which the customer orientation appears to be incongruent with the educational lives of college students, and explores the impacts of a customer orientation on students’ educational behaviors and decisions. The conclusion calls for reliable research on the extent to which students actually express a customer orientation and for efforts to resist this orientation and its inherently negative implications.

Gender gaps in educational expectations and postsecondary enrollment are well studied, but few scholars have investigated the extent to which students realize or fail to realize their expectations. Even fewer have examined how the likelihood of realizing one's expectations may differ for men and women. Using 35 years of data, this study examines the role race, social class, and significant others' influences have played in realizing educational expectations and how these relationships have differed for men and women. It also investigates how group gender differences in these characteristics have contributed to the gap between the proportion of men and proportion of women who have realized their educational expectations via college enrollment. Results show trends in realized expectations by gender over time. Group gender differences explain little of past gaps but returns on students' characteristics differ by gender, which has been a key explanatory factor for differences between men and women in realizing their expectations. Implications of these findings relative to policy and program initiatives are discussed.

This white paper discusses College for All (CFA), a perspective that sees increased college attendance as a desired outcome for individuals and society.

Institutions of higher education rely on student surveys for a number of purposes, including planning, assessment, and research. Web surveys are especially prevalent given their ease of use and low-cost; yet, obtaining a high response rate is a challenge. Although researchers have investigated the use of incentives in traditional mail surveys, studies investigating the impact of lottery incentives on web survey response rates are limited. In this study, four separate web survey experiments were conducted to measure the effectiveness of lottery-based incentives in a college student population in the United States. Findings reveal that the lottery incentives not only positively impacted response rates but also exerted differential effects by gender. The results have practical implications for higher education researchers who conduct web surveys of college students.

This study advances our knowledge of students' online self-disclosures by examining a random sample of students' Facebook profiles at a large, public research University in the Northeast. A quantitative content analysis revealed that the vast majority of students had a Facebook account and very small proportions restricted access of their profile to University staff. Substantial proportions of students' profiles contained contact information, course schedules, positive references to the University, and pictures of students' consuming alcohol. Detailed implications for practice are discussed.