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This paper assesses how UK universities seek to maintain their global dominant position post-Brexit through comprehensive strategic partnerships with key European institutions as part of their internationalisation strategies. Drawing on 24 semi-structured interviews conducted from November 2017 to July 2018 in 12 UK universities vertically differentiated and spread along the highly hierarchised spectrum of British universities in all four nations, we aim to examine which types of universities are most inclined to form international comprehensive university-wide strategic partnerships, and how they identify their partners. The analysis is framed within Bourdieu's theory of "economy of practices" which considers all university practices as economic practices that are ultimately tailored towards maximising either material or symbolic profit. Unlike in business and industry, where organisations traditionally compete to maximise profit, universities must both compete and collaborate with one another in order to improve (or maintain) their position in the field. UK universities will need to navigate the post-Brexit space they find themselves thrown into, and in the process will need to review international institutional links with both European Union (EU) based and non-EU universities. This paper will assess how UK universities seek to maintain their dominant position in the field through comprehensive strategic partnerships with key foreign institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global trend of increasing participation rates, coupled with regional goals to increase participation in higher education, such as the European Union's Europe 2020 Strategy target of 40% of all young people to hold a tertiary education qualification by 2020, has led to a strain on public resources, and a review of funding priorities in mass higher education systems, in some cases prioritising funding towards an elite. Reforms within European higher education systems have been further prompted by the lacklustre performance of European higher education institutions in international university rankings. The paper aims to contextualise French reforms within the broader European Union agenda for the modernisation of higher education, and its focus on greater differentiation, in order to assess how this has been disseminated and translated in the French context, and how it breaks with the French egalitarian tradition. Through a policy document analysis of French and EU strategies for higher education and research and political communications and data extracted from the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation's Excellence Initiatives scheme, the paper seeks to understand whether France is creating a multi-tiered higher education system for which no precedent has existed before. However, because of the sui generis structure of French higher education that makes it difficult to classify within the various structural models of higher education, policy implications for other countries will not be discussed. The French case will provide insights on the converging trends of globalisation, and the agency of institutional carriers such as the European Commission in interpreting and disseminating particular strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mobility of EU students and staff is threatened by Brexit, as the favourable conditions allowing for a frictionless cross-border academic learning and scientific research base are renegotiated at the highest political levels, including the pre-Brexit freedom of movement of persons and home fees for EU students. However, the UK higher education system is highly differentiated, and its hierarchical nature implies that criteria such as age, history, geographical location, economic resources, research activity, teaching quality, academic selectivity and socioeconomic student mix will have important ramifications when assessing the vulnerabilities of UK higher education institutions and the internationalisation of UK higher education should the UK leave the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK higher education sector has entered a period of turbulence, as the consequences of the UK leaving the European Union (EU) hit home. Higher education institutions are bracing themselves for what will no doubt be a period of substantial change, uncertainty and challenge. The complexity of the intricate relationships linking EU member states, as well as the EU institutions and their member states, appears to have been misunderstood and understated in the UK, by both the political class and the general public, at the time of the June 2016 referendum. If information is indeed power, its current unavailability is a concern, given that the UK government's plans to remain firmly embedded within the European Research Area and the Erasmus+ programme remain non-committal. In what can be described as a game of high politics between the EU and the UK government, the fate of research and higher education collaboration will be sealed by high-level inter-governmental agreements decided behind closed doors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]