Welcome to HIGHER EDUCATION REVIEW

HIGHER EDUCATION REVIEW is an academic journal concerned with policy and practice, with contributions soundly based in research or scholarship, but with implications for reform or change. It seeks to ensure rigour in these analyses by taking a problem oriented approach; it is concerned to help formulate the problems of higher education, to consider alternative solutions and to test them. Lastly, it seeks to cover the whole field of post-school education and with all those who work with or within the field: academics, students, administrators and policymakers at all levels.

Current issue:  Summer 2010

This edition of Higher Education Review fulfils the intentions set out above by containing articles addressing several key issues in higher education policy: Professor Gillian Evans considers the threats to institutional autonomy posed by current policy; Professor Rob Cuthbert discusses the perilous implications of the identification of students as nature of students as customers; and Peter Williams considers the nature of and mechanisms for maintaining quality and standards. In his 'Notes from North America' Paul Alper revisits James Watson’s ‘The Double Helix’  and manages in his inimitable way to link this to a critical look at features of higher education and culture in the USA. 

Professor John Pratt

Editor

Contents Volume 42 Number 3 Summer 2010

Current policy on university governance may create ‘a profoundly dangerous instability for universities'

• This is the conclusion of the article University autonomy: two fault-lines by Professor Gillian Evans from Cambridge University is this issue of Higher Education Review.  Professor Evans argues that the policy-drivers of university governance reform in the UK have

‘pushed energetically towards the implementation of a model in which a small body with a majority of external members takes ultimate responsibility for the policy decisions taken in each institution’.  

 Recent conspicuous failures at London Metropolitan and Sussex Universities show functional breakdown, first at the junction between the institution and the state, and second within the institution, where the unity in policy-making between academic and financial-and-managerial decision-making, ‘often proves to be illusory’.

• Students as customers? by Rob Cuthbert. The Director of the Centre for Authentic Management and Policymaking in University at the University of the West of England examines the concept of students as the customers of a university and looks at the role markets can play in managing higher education systems.

'The idea that students migh be treated as customers triggers academics' antipathy, which in turn can lead to managerial irritation and political frustration. There are different discourses which barely overlap as their protagonists speak past one another'.

 The article argues that these differences can be reconciled by re-conceiving the relationship between the university and the student. 

•  The best university degrees to get a job by Adrian Furnham and K V Pertrides. The authors (from University College London) investigate opinions of 500 members of the public on the usefulness of certain degrees in terms of employability. The study produced some surprising results with only one vocationally oriented subject appearing at the top of the list.
•  Note: Quality and standards in higher education by Peter Williams. The former head of the Quality Assurance Agency presents definitions of and facts about ‘quality’ and ‘standards’ and makes radical suggestions about what ought to be done about them.

'The adoption of such a regime would, I believe, both simplify and improve our higher education system, offering a more purposeful and understandable activity for all involved with it, and making its qualifications credible once more'

Plus...

Notes from North America:

• Reprise by Paul Alper.

Books:

• Access - and after? by John Wyatt. Other books reviewed by Helen Colley, Christopher J Downs, John Mace, Roger Homan and Roger Brown.

• Select annotated list of publications received compiled by Deborah Hillier.

• Indexes: Autumn 2007 to Summer 2010, Volumes 40, 41 and 42


Coming shortly:

Highlights of the next issue (Autumn 2010) to be published in October

• Professor Tom Bourner on ‘Reflective learning in higher education: working with experiential data’

• David Limond on 'Towards a for-profit university in Dublin: Another brick in the wall of neo-liberalism?'

   

• Ping Wang on ‘An in-class silent postgraduate Chinese student: a journey of learning’

• Jane Pearce and Christopher Crouch on using study groups to provide space for creativity and reflexivity in an instrumentalist university environment

  ... and much more

  © HigherEducationReview.com