A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

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Education at a Glance

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

"Great Expectations and Mixed Performance. The Implementation of Higher Education Reforms in Europe", Ladislav Cerych, Paul Sabatier, 1986 : [recenzja] / Czesław Kupisiewicz.

While study success and completion rates are important issues in educational policy, research highlights the particular relevance of the first year in higher education (HE) for students’ future academic performance and achievement. In Germany, the recent reform of degree programmes appears to have created new challenges related to students’ transition to HE, yet little is known about the specific requirements students perceive as critical for their first-year experience. The present study, therefore, seeks to explore the first-year challenges in German HE from the student perspective focusing on the nexus of the individual and institutional factors relevant for successful transition. Following the critical incident technique, data collection consisted of semi-structured interviews with 25 students from all six faculties of a German university. We employed the qualitative content analysis to examine first-year challenges in terms of the critical requirements emerging from the interviews. First, the thematic analysis of the data resulted in identifying a broad range of personal, organisational, content-related and social requirements students perceived as critical for transition to HE. Second, the quantitative analysis of code occurrence suggested that personal and organisational requirements are most relevant from the students’ perspectives. Finally, the single-case analysis of the interviews disclosed that individual students experience an accumulation of first-year challenges revealing the interconnectedness of critical requirements. In sum, the findings offer a systematic overview of the first-year challenges as well as provide detailed insights on how the interplay of institutional and individual factors contributes to the transition to HE.

The first year in higher education—critical requirements from the student perspective

This article provides a meta-analysis on the effect of academic probation, student-faculty mentoring and need-based grants on various student outcomes. Using 25 (quasi-) experimental studies, we fi...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00131911.2017.1300874

Interventions in higher education and their effect on student success: a meta-analysis

Der Beitrag behandelt den Ubergang in die Hochschule mit Blick auf die Passung individueller Studienvoraussetzungen und institutioneller Studienangebote. Dies wird zunachst theoretisch begrundet, bevor die besonderen Herausforderungen der Studieneingangsphase anhand einer qualitativen Interviewstudie analysiert werden. Die Ergebnisse bieten einen systematischen Uberblick kritischer Studienanforderungen, weisen ihre individuellen und institutionellen Entstehungsbedingungen aus und illustrieren ihre komplexe Verknupfung im Studienalltag. Die differenzierte Betrachtung der Studieneingangsphase mundet in Perspektiven fur eine evidenzbasierte Lehr- und Hochschulentwicklung. 19.12.2014 | Elke Bosse & Caroline Trautwein (Hamburg)

Individuelle und institutionelle Herausforderungen der Studieneingangsphase

Heterogenitat in der Studieneingangsphase Steigende Studierendenzahlen haben zu wachsender Aufmerksamkeit fur die Heterogenitat der Studierendenschaft gefuhrt sowie zu diversen Forderangeboten, die den Ubergang an die Hochschule unterstutzen. Um die Bedeutung von Heterogenitat fur die Studieneingangsphase naher zu untersuchen, wird zunachst der aktuelle Forschungsstand skizziert. Anhand einer Interviewstudie wird zudem beleuchtet, wie sich Heterogenitat im Profil von Studierenden und in ihrer Wahrnehmung von Herausforderungen der Studieneingangsphase widerspiegelt. Der gewonnene Einblick in die Mehrdeutigkeit und das komplexe Zusammenspiel von Heterogenitatsaspekten liefert Anhaltspunkte fur die Gestaltung von Fordermasnahmen. 16.12.2015 | Elke Bosse (Hamburg)

Exploring the role of student diversity for the first-year experience

Although participation in higher education (HE) has expanded in Europe, social inequalities remain a major political challenge. As HE expansion has not led to equal access and success, the mechanisms behind policies seeking to reduce inequalities need to be examined. Focusing on the widening participation agenda, this article investigates how universities translate political demands to their local contexts. The translation perspective is adopted to study the German HE system as an example characterized by high social exclusion. Based on policy document analysis, the study first explores the rationales underlying the discourse on widening participation. Second, a multiple case study design is used to investigate the organizational responses to the demand of widening participation. The findings indicate that the political discourse is dominated by two perspectives that regard widening participation as either a means to bring about social justice or to ensure a reliable pool of skilled labor. The study further reveals that different legitimizing strategies serve to link the policy of widening participation to local contexts. This study contributes to research on social inequalities in HE by introducing a translation perspective that permits analysis at both macro and organizational levels, while acknowledging institutional variations in organizational responses to political demands.

The Widening Participation Agenda in German Higher Education: Discourses and Legitimizing Strategies

In the light of growing university entry rates, higher education institutions not only serve larger numbers of students, but also seek to meet first-year students’ ever more diverse needs. Yet to inform universities how to support the transition to higher education, research only offers limited insights. Current studies tend to either focus on the individual factors that affect student success or they highlight students’ social background and their educational biography in order to examine the achievement of selected, non-traditional groups of students. Both lines of research appear to lack integration and often fail to take organisational diversity into account, such as different types of higher education institutions or degree programmes. For a more comprehensive understanding of student diversity, the present study includes individual, social and organisational factors. To gain insights into their role for the transition to higher education, we examine how the different factors affect the students’ perception of the formal and informal requirements of the first year as more or less difficult to cope with. As the perceived requirements result from both the characteristics of the students and the institutional context, they allow to investigate transition at the interface of the micro and the meso level of higher education. Latent profile analyses revealed that there are no profiles with complex patterns of perception of the first-year requirements, but the identified groups rather differ in the overall level of perceived challenges. Moreover, SEM indicates that the differences in the perception largely depend on the individual factors self-efficacy and volition.

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Elke Bosse

Papers

The first year in higher education—critical requirements from the student perspective

Individuelle und institutionelle Herausforderungen der Studieneingangsphase

Exploring the role of student diversity for the first-year experience

The Widening Participation Agenda in German Higher Education: Discourses and Legitimizing Strategies

How Different Diversity Factors Affect the Perception of First-Year Requirements in Higher Education