When Burton Clark (1973) reviewed the development of the sociology of higher education in the United States, from its post-World War II expansion through to the 1960s, he identi ed two dominant streams of research activity. First, the study of inequality in education beyond the high school, which was mainly concerned with issues of admissions and the institutional differences in student experiences. The second stream focused on the impact of the university experience on the cognitive, social and moral development of students. The study of educational inequality and the impact of college on students at that time was very much measurement driven: technical considerations of the reliability and validity of instruments dominated discussion. The legacy was a “relatively massive but trivial” literature (Clark, 1973, p. 8). Alongside, or in reaction to, the large studies  nding small changes in values and attitudes, was the growth of analytical ethnographic approaches that produced case studies and vignettes. In Clark’s view, these approaches needed conceptual focus and hard criticism if they were to avoid the “reduction of scholarly discipline to journalistic play” (1973, p. 9). Broadly speaking, the dimensions of equity and institutional impact on student development underpin much of the research still being carried out at system and institutional levels, and they also provide the starting point for a great deal of the work done on the  rst year experience, particularly in Australian and New Zealand higher education. Likewise, the problems and tensions associated with the methodologies, as characterised by Clark, persist in much the same way as they did in the early 1970s. Research concerned with the  rst year experience is still focused to a considerable extent around issues of equity and the ways university in uences student lives. Unlike the sociology and psychology of the 1970s, the major driving force now comes from the pressure of accountability and ef ciency on institutions, academics and support staff to address the problems and pitfalls facing students in the initial days and weeks of their undergraduate courses. This has assumed some urgency as more students now commence university study from more diverse academic backgrounds and levels of preparation. Given the widespread efforts to devise, implement and test strategies that might counter these problems, it is hardly surprising that most of what  lls the journals and conference proceedings is program evaluation and institutional assessment directed at monitoring and improving the experience of students. The problematic nature of the  rst year experience is generally agreed, and there

Researching the First Year Experience: Where to from here?

Research on higher education grew in European countries from scattered individual activities towards a certain degree of visibility in the 1970s, largely as consequence of growing public problem awareness. In the 1980s, it experienced a set-back due to declining public interest in higher education as a key issue of societal policies. From the late 1980s onwards, research in this domain again drew attention and support in the wake of debates about the knowledge society, new modes of steering and management and the increasing internationalisation of higher education. However, growth and consolidation of this research were accompanied by a more rapid growth of policy-geared information collection and dissemination in the framework of evaluation, consultancy, expert commissions and the daily work of the growing number of higher education professionals. Research on higher education often does not have a solid institutional base and it both benefits and suffers from the fact that it is a theme-base area of research, drawing from different disciplines, and that the borderline is fuzzy between researchers and other experts on higher education. But a growth and quality improvement of research on higher education can be observed in recent years — certainly to some extent due to growing cooperation of researchers across Europe and to increasing cooperation in comparative projects. In the future, the first steps undertaken to establish study programmes for higher education experts could turn out be beneficial not only for the dissemination of research findings, but also for the quality of young researchers in this domain.

Research on Higher Education in Europe.

Articles published in three leading North American higher education journals during the year 2000 are compared with those published in three leading, English language, non-North American higher education journals (and with a larger sample of fourteen such journals). The comparison focuses on the location of their authors, the themes researched, the levels at which the analyses are pitched, the methods and methodologies employed, and the explicitness of both methodological and theoretical engagement. Compared to the non-North American sample, the North American articles evidence a dominance of North American-based authors, a greater focus on the student experience, and on institutional and national level studies, and a much stronger emphasis on multivariate analysis as a method. Articles in the North American sample were also more likely to be both methodologically and theoretically explicit. Possible reasons for the divergent patterns observed are identified and discussed.

Bridging the Divide: a comparative analysis of articles in higher education journals published inside and outside North America.

The articles published in 15 specialist academic journals – based in Australasia, Europe and North America – focusing on higher education in the years 2010 (n = 567) and 2000 (n = 388) are analysed. The analysis focuses on: the themes and issues addressed in the articles published, the methods and methodologies used, theoretical engagement, the level of analysis, and the sex, location and department of the authors. Three main trends are identified over the period 2000–2010: a striking increase in the volume of high quality higher education research being published (outside North America), the increasingly international orientation of the leading higher education research journals (outside North America), and the growing role of women as higher education researchers.

Higher education research 2000–2010: changing journal publication patterns

Higher education research is a multidisciplinary field, engaging researchers from across the academy who make use of a wide range of methodological approaches. This article examines the relation between discipline and methodology in higher education research, analysing a database of 567 articles published in 15 leading higher education journals internationally during 2010. It finds that, while a wide variety of methods and methodologies are employed to research higher education, their usage is common to researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds. Greater variation is apparent geographically, however, in the use of complex multivariate techniques, with North American researchers more commonly making use of these.

Discipline and methodology in higher education research

Introduction Research and Training in Higher Education: The State of the Art by Philip G. Altbach Inventory Usage Guide by Philip G. Altbach and David Engberg Inventory of Higher Education Programs, Institutes, and Centers by Philip G. Altbach and David Engberg Journals in Higher Education: An International Inventory by Yoshikazu Ogawa Country Index Appendix: The Questionnaire

Higher Education: A Worldwide Inventory of Centers and Programs

Government sponsored scholarship programs for global student mobility are only a small part of total flows of international students, but these programs are quite important in several countries. Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and the European Union sponsor programs that provide mobility for many thousands of students. Other countries have smaller programs. This article discusses fiscal, sponsorship, and other key elements of some of these programs.

/pdf/global-student-mobility-the-changing-landscape-3rp6q7zgvw.pdf

David Engberg

Papers

Higher Education: A Worldwide Inventory of Centers and Programs

Global Student Mobility: The Changing Landscape