How conceptualisations of curriculum in higher education influence student-staff co-creation in and of the curriculum Abstract There is a wide range of activity taking place under the banner of ‘co-created curriculum’ within higher education. Some of this variety is due to the different ways people think about ‘co-creation’, but significant variation is also due to the ways in which higher education curriculum is conceptualised, and how these conceptualisations position the student in relation to the curriculum. In addition, little attention is paid to the differences between co-creation of the curriculum and co-creation in the curriculum. This paper addresses this gap by examining four theoretical frameworks used to inform higher education curriculum design. We examine how each framework considers the position of the learner and how this might influence the kinds of curricular co-creation likely to be enacted. We conclude by calling for more discussion of curriculum and curriculum theories in higher education—and for these discussions to include students. We argue that more clarity is needed from scholars and practitioners as to how they are defining curriculum, and whether they are focused on co-creation of the curriculum or co-creation in the curriculum. Finally, we suggest that paying greater attention to curriculum theories and their assumptions about the learner, offers enhanced understanding of curricular intentions and the extent to which collaboration is possible within any particular context.

Academic promotions at a South African university: questions of bias, politics and transformation Abstract The system of academic promotion provides a mechanism for the achievements of staff to be recognised. However, it can be a mechanism that creates or reflects inequalities, with certain groups rising to the top more readily than others. In many universities, especially in the global North, white men are preponderant in senior academic ranks. This leads to concerns about sexism and racism operating within processes of promotion. There is a global sensitivity that academic hierarchies should be demographically representative. In this study, we examine the data on eleven years of promotions at the University of Cape Town (UCT), a highly ranked, research-led university in South Africa. Its historical roots lie in a colonial past, and despite substantial increases in the number of black scholars, its academic staff complement is still majority white, driving the intensification of its transformation efforts. A quantitative analysis using time to promotion as a proxy for fairness was used to examine patterns of promotion at the university. Although international staff, those in more junior positions, with higher qualifications and in certain faculties enjoyed quicker promotion time, no association was found between time to promotion and gender. There were some differences in time to promotion associated with self-declared ethnicity (taken as synonymous with race), but these associations were not consistent. Although our findings provide some quantitative evidence of UCT’s success at creating a fair system of academic advancement, broader demographic transformation remains a priority. However, this cannot be addressed in isolation from the wider higher education enterprise.

Students’ university aspirations and attainment grouping in secondary schools Abstract International evidence shows that students from more disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to attend university. We examine the potential link between university aspiration and secondary schools’ attainment grouping practices (tracking/setting). Modelling of longitudinal student questionnaires (N = 6680) completed in England suggests that there is a slight cumulative association between students’ university aspirations and their set placement. Interestingly, we find that students’ self-confidence predicts university aspirations over and above both prior aspirations and attainment. Our findings suggest that to improve our understanding of students’ university aspirations it is crucial to take account of factors other than just prior attainment. The concept of capacity to aspire emphasises the multiplicity of factors involved in enabling or hindering aspirations for university, and their interaction over time. We argue that universities have an important role in realising more socially just patterns in higher education participation through outreach work that can enhance students’ capacity to aspire to university.

More necessary and less sufficient: an age-period-cohort approach to overeducation from a comparative perspective Abstract In many countries, the skilled labor market has lagged educational expansion. As a result of increased competition, younger cohorts of the highly educated face decreasing returns to education or overeducation. Surprisingly, decreasing occupational outcomes do not coincide empirically with the economic returns among those with tertiary education. Regarding the process of changes in economic returns to education based on cohort transformations, we expect that the expansion of tertiary education affects specific cohorts, which find themselves facing more labor market competition. As a result, the economic returns to education should decrease among younger cohorts even when the overall returns to education remain stable over time. To study this process, we model economic returns with a new age-period-cohort-trended lag (APCTLAG) method, which allows us to compare the gap in economic returns between tertiary and less than tertiary education over cohorts. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we analyze trends over three decades in 12 countries. Our results confirm that educational returns for tertiary education have declined over time, even though the gap between the educated and the less educated has remained similar in most of the countries. For younger cohorts, tertiary education has become more necessary to survive in the competitive labor market, but the actual economic returns have decreased—making tertiary education less sufficient than before.

‘I wish to do an internship (abroad)’: investigating the perceived employability of domestic and international business internships Abstract This study examines the perceived employability of facultative domestic and international business internships, using an experimental between-subject factorial design. A sample of 194 Portuguese business employees rated the employability of six fictitious résumés of business graduates varying in gender and participation in a facultative internship. The résumés were target to an entry-level marketing position and were rated on a set of employability outcomes, such as job suitability, employability skills and starting salary. The results showed that the non-participation condition resulted in the worst rates of job suitability and employability skills, while the outcomes of the international and the domestic conditions were not significantly different from each other. Male interns were the most well ranked in job suitability and starting salary, while female non-interns were the worst ranked. This study provides evidence that an internship experience, even if facultative, is an information ‘good to add’ in the résumé but does not support the prediction that ‘the more international the better’. This evidence suggests that graduates’ employability depends not only on the academic credentials and skills they can bring to the labour market as on the expectations about their unique contribution. This study is one of the first to empirically examine the perceived employability of facultative business internships, exploring the relevance and value of domestic and international experiences.

Balancing accountability and trust: university reforms in the Nordic countries Abstract This paper investigates the accountability mechanisms introduced in the universities in the Nordic countries by building on a typology of accountability types. By utilising survey data, it analyses how academics experience the changes in accountability mechanisms and how they perceive the impact of these changes on their performance. The analysis shows that especially political/bureaucratic and managerial accountability demands have been strengthened. This development has fostered debates on how to measure academic performance. Some academics, more in Denmark than in the other countries, have experienced the development as a sign of mistrust.

“They lost internationalization in pursuit of internationalization”: students’ language practices and identity construction in a cross-disciplinary EMI program in a university in China Abstract This qualitative study investigates the experiences of students in an English as a medium of instruction (EMI) program at a comprehensive university in China and how they construct identity and negotiate legitimacy in the interaction between Western and Eastern traditions and systems in the internationalization of higher education. It finds that this focal EMI program is operated in a combined model of Western systems with local sociocultural and political influences and historical traditions. It also finds that uncertainty and contradiction experienced by both academic staff and students when flexible bilingual teaching are adopted. The findings indicate that internationalization in higher education, despite its ideologically motivated nature, may produce curricular homogeneity but also creates a heterogeneous context of cultures and values and promotes critical understanding of internationalization, globalization, and diversity among students. It is also found that the privilege-afforded EMI students may constrain their future options and lead to identity ambivalence. This investigation is of significance to universities in East Asia that have promoted themselves as world-class universities by implementing internationalization and benchmarking themselves in relation to top universities in English-speaking countries.

Why academics should have a duty of truth telling in an epoch of post-truth? Abstract In this article, I advocate that university education has at its core a mission to enable its communities of scholars (staff and students) to make judgements on what can be trusted, and that they, themselves, should be truth-tellers. It is about society being able to rely upon academic statements, avoiding deliberate falsehoods. This requires trust in oneself to make those judgements; an obligation to do so; and the courage to speak out when such judgements might be unpopular, risky or potentially unsafe. I suggest it should be a duty placed on academics to be truth-tellers and to educate potentially gullible others in what it is to have worthy and reliable self-trust in their own judgements.

Unfolding the direct and indirect effects of social class of origin on faculty income Abstract Studies on faculty income have typically focused on disparities associated with gender and race. Surprisingly, much less attention has been paid to the social class background of university faculty and how it might affect their pathways to the professoriate and their opportunities to access high-paying positions. We attempted to address this gap in the literature by looking at a sample of faculty working at Chilean universities. We used a path analysis approach to estimate not only the direct effects of social class of origin on income but also the indirect mechanisms through which social class of origin influences faculty income. We posed two alternative conceptual perspectives with regard to the effects of social class on income—social reproduction and human capital. We found that faculty who come from the upper social class have access to higher-quality undergraduate education and to more prestigious PhD-granting universities and they report higher earnings as compared with those who come from a low social class. These findings resemble a dynamic of cumulative educational advantages that provides grounds to the theory of social reproduction. Although it could be argued that the positive effect of prestige of the PhD-granting university on income is in line with the human capital theory, we claim that such effect cannot be analyzed independently from the direct and indirect relationships that exist between social class of origin and the prestige of the university from which faculty obtained their doctorate degrees.

Alignment between universities and their affiliated professional schools: organizational segmentation and institutional logics in the USA Abstract Universities are classically understood as segmented organizations. In the USA, ties between the university and law and medical schools may be particularly loose because these units have powerful ties to communities of practice and are linked to particular resource streams. Because of these ties to different social fields, medical and law schools may invoke different institutional logics that differentiate their communications from those of the parent university. Latent class analysis identified three distinct categories of university, medical, and law school mission statements in the USA. Logistic regression then predicted the circumstances under which a university and its affiliated professional school were likely to espouse mission statements that fell within the same category. Results indicate that agreement is likely when professional school and university share similar resource bases, suggesting that relationships between universities and their constituent units likely vary as local context moderates macro level patterns.