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Significant collaborations with research partners in China are seen in many Western countries. With increasing US-China geopolitical tensions, governments, research institutions, and individuals in established scientific systems are increasingly required to address a proliferating array of risks and challenges associated with collaboration with China. Academic researchers are only beginning to describe how countries are responding to the ongoing need for global scientific collaboration amidst intensifying geopolitical competition. Several studies have examined the securitization of scientific connections with China in the USA, while others have documented developments in nations such as Australia, the UK, and Sweden. However, there is limited comparative research on approaches to international science amid geopolitical tensions. This paper bridges the gap, illuminating the key dimensions of variation in country-level responses by comparing the cases of Sweden and Australia. The questions we ask are as follows: Who responds to the challenges? By what means? And to what ends are responses directed? Swedish government have been largely passive, but Swedish funding agencies have developed "responsible internationalisation" guidelines that aim to induce proactive reflection by institutions and individual researchers. Australia's approach, by contrast, has centred on legislation, the exercise of ministerial powers, along with sector-wide enactment of expanded due diligence protocols. The comparison highlights key differences in the actors, methods and goals of responses to the intensifying geopolitics of scientific collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the drivers of student dropout from higher education has been a policy concern for several decades. However, the contributing role of certain factors—including student mental health—remains poorly understood. Furthermore, existing studies linking student mental health and university dropout are limited in both methodology and scope—for example, they often rely on small and/or non-representative samples or subjective measures, and focus almost exclusively on main effects. This paper overcomes many of these shortcomings by leveraging unique linked administrative data on the full population of domestic students commencing undergraduate studies at Australian universities between 2012 and 2015 (n = 652,139). Using these data, we document that approximately 15% of students drop out of university within their first academic year. Critically, students receiving treatment for mental health problems are 4.3 (adjusted) to 8.3 (unadjusted) percentage points more likely to drop out of higher education. This association remains in the presence of an encompassing set of potential confounds, and is remarkably uniform across segments of the student population determined by individual, family, and programme characteristics. Altogether, our findings call for increased policy efforts to improve student mental health and to buffer against its deleterious effects on retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1988 Dawkins reforms were designed, at least in part, to encourage public universities to organize themselves as if they were corporate enterprises, in order to create a more efficient and competitive sector that was less reliant on government funding. This paper assesses whether successive policy changes since the 1988 Dawkins reforms have achieved these efficiency, competition, and funding objectives. It does so by examining their financial performance over time, applying the techniques employed by investment analysts in the private sector to assess the performance of market participants. It demonstrates that the policy changes have reduced efficiency and competitiveness, and weakened the financial position of a number of universities. It provides empirical support for previous research highlighting the significant structural and regulatory constraints on the creation of a competitive market in higher education. Furthermore, it demonstrates that 35 years of policy change have merely reinforced pre-existing market positions and that, even before the impact of the COVID pandemic is considered, the financial position of the sector has been weakened as a result of the changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on research exploring the academic workload and performance practices of Australian universities. This research has identified a suite of activities associated with teaching, research and service, each with an associated time value (allocation). This led to the development of the academic workload estimation tool (AWET). In 2020, to validate the findings, we contacted academics willing to participate further and conducted interviews. We used the AWET to estimate workload for each individual for the previous year and compared it to the workload allocated according to their institutional workload model. Discrepancies were then discussed to ascertain to what extent the AWET was able to capture their work. In general, the participants thought the AWET provided a more realistic estimate of their actual work and highlighted how much is underestimated or unaccounted for by the workload models used within their institutions. It also showed how academic performance policies, focussed primarily on research output, disadvantaged many individuals because they ignored or minimised many scholarly, teaching and service-related tasks inherent in the academic role. Overall, the findings showed the AWET was a useful tool to discuss academic work and assisted them to better capture the complexity and extent of what they did. We offer the AWET as a validated approach for academics to estimate their workload in a holistic and transparent manner. We suggest its implementation institution-wide, along with an aligned performance policy, will facilitate negotiation of reasonable performance expectations. This will rebuild trust in the processes and improve a university's effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the prevalence of group work in higher education in Australia can be construed as a cultural or institutional practice, it has become a site of struggle for many international students who must negotiate the normative practices embedded in group work. This paper aims to investigate how six Japanese international students at Australian universities explore, negotiate and respond to the normative practices of group work through group projects. The findings reveal that students actively sought and negotiated hidden and implied normative practices of group work. Their responses to the norms were underpinned by the norms being inculcated into their dispositions or, namely, habitus, in the form of beliefs and values, which enabled them to critically examine their group practices. Additionally, when they identified a mismatch between their perceived norms and the responses of their peers, which is realised through Bourdieu's concept of 'hysteresis', they were found to take leadership opportunities. We contend in this paper that when their practices or group practices are at odds with the perceived or identified norms, it induces their hysteresis encounters, which represent initiation of alternative actions and capacity to embrace learning opportunities. We also argue that the investigation into this phenomenon is vital in identifying practices that reproduce fallacies and missed opportunities or prevent students from embracing true virtues of group work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of managerial university reforms, collegiality emerges as an idea that unites academics, and that both symbolises and legitimises the collective aspirations of the academy. Typically, collegiality is positioned as an unquestionably "good thing"—an unproblematic academic ideal or an academic structure—obscuring the contingency of social arrangements in universities. This paper investigates the plurality of collegial practices that unfold "on the ground" in the context of university reforms and the diversification of the academic workforce over recent decades. The paper presents a qualitative and exploratory study of collegial practices in seven contemporary Australian and New Zealand/Aotearoa universities, employing a social cartographic analysis. Eleven types of logics underpinning collegial practices are identified and described in detail, by drawing on examples of collegial practices offered by fifteen research participants. A reconfigured picture of academic relations is presented, revealing the range of collegial practices that tend to be subsumed under a generic notion of collegiality. The effects of different types of collegial practices are examined, contesting exclusionary collegial relations and highlighting practices that have the potential to produce a more inclusive and socially just academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One fundamental aspect of organizational transformation in higher education is the change to the profile of universities' non-academic workforce. Key staffing trends identified in recent studies conducted in a variety of national settings include an increase in the proportion of non-academic staff at universities and a shift toward more highly qualified and remunerated non-academic roles. This paper examines the extent to which these trends have played out at Australian universities over the period 1997 to 2017. Drawing on unpublished sets of staffing data, the analyses show that while the proportion of non-academic positions at Australian universities has remained largely stable, there has been a striking and uniform growth in management-rank positions, concurrent with a substantial decline in lower-level and less expensive support roles. This has some significant implications, in particular the growth in more complex "corporate" structures, the relatively fewer staff to support academic work, and the increase in the relative costs associated with maintaining the non-academic workforce at Australian universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the limited empirical analysis of higher education students' perceptions of contemporary labour market demands. It explores their perspectives on the health of the graduate labour market, what factors determine these and how their perceptions relate to self-perceived employability, career proactivity, career control and efforts to develop positional advantage. Further, the study examines determinants of students' career planning, all in the context of a challenging graduate labour market and higher education systems that have become more market-driven. The paper draws on evidence from a survey among Australian and UK students (N = 433), from two institutions and across a range of disciplines. Data revealed a number of significant findings. Overall, students who reported more positive perceptions of the current labour market were more likely to develop higher self-perceptions of employability, believe they had a greater sense of control over their career yet were less engaged with proactive career behaviours. Students perceived employability, their sense of career control and their reported career proactivity positively determined their engagement in career planning. The study enhances our understanding of the impact of labour market demand-side factors on student approaches to careers. It raises significant implications for universities and their career practitioners in identifying ways of enhancing students' career planning strategies within a more challenging labour market context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant body of work problematises the assumption that student evaluations of teaching (SET) actually measure teaching quality. This is concerning, given that SET are increasingly relied upon not only to evaluate candidates for employment (so job acquisition is influenced by flawed data) but also to inform performance metrics for those in employment (so job security is influenced by flawed data). This paper presents qualitative research conducted at a large public university in Australia. The findings suggest that student evaluations of teaching seem to measure conformity with gendered expectations rather than teaching quality, with particularly negative effects for women. The integration of SET into performance management practices within institutions of higher education could be entrenching inequalities amongst university staff that could ultimately disadvantage female academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doctoral training continues to grow in scale and scope in Australia, but has been subjected to far less design and improvement compared with other facets of higher education. Governments and universities engage in ongoing change which helps respond to opportunities and challenges but also leads to a proliferation of options and approaches. The current research study was seeded and shaped by the ambitious view that despite such refinement the doctorate remains in need of much bolder and deeper design, and particularly design with an education focus. This paper reports outcomes from a four-year national project which sought to articulate a doctoral design architecture. The paper discusses framing contexts and concepts, design and characteristics of the doctoral architecture, then implications for sectoral, institutional and individual practice. It concludes that this kind of architecture can provide a useful guide for growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing market of international students puts increasing pressure on higher education providers to also provide language support, as students from non-English speaking background face the dual challenge of developing their English language proficiency alongside their subject content. However, there is little research on how knowledge about language is actually integrated with content knowledge in practice or how such an integration can be supported by curriculum design. Using a case study of a popular academic language support program implemented in an Australian university, this paper examines the relationship between academic literacy and business ethics as two distinct forms of disciplinary knowledge, to investigate how the complexity of their integration is managed dynamically in the classroom. In this study, we draw on Legitimation Code Theory to analyze the role of language in constructing discipline-specific knowledge. Our findings suggest that students do not automatically understand the relevance of language support and that shifting knowledge practices during classroom interaction can enhance students' motivation as well as help students to relate their knowledge about language to the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the largest and most comprehensive Australian research to date that explores the campus climate for sexuality and gender diverse (SGD) people at one university. Using a mixed-method approach that incorporated an online survey open to all students and staff (n = 2395), face-to-face in-depth interviews with key stakeholders (n = 16) and an online document analysis, the study explored participants' perceptions and attitudes to sexuality and gender diversity on campus, experiences of in/exclusion, (un)safe places, visibility in public online documents, and the campus-based services available to support SGD individuals. The findings point to the ongoing exclusion experienced by SGD people across the university. We show how exclusion serves to silence individuals across multiple levels and how this, in turn, limits the visibility of, and redress for, exclusion, impacting on health and well-being. This tension, we posit, can only be addressed safely and holistically through proactive and strategic endeavours on the part of the institution; without which, exclusion will continue to prevail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study that investigated the range of institutional support needs of international students at one Australian university with a view to increasing understanding of their needs and the ways in which support was provided. The study involved a number of data collection methods including focus groups, key informant interviews and a larger scale survey, undertaken in an inductive and sequential process. The results indicated that the levels of awareness about services differed, that lack of knowledge of how to access a service and finding information about it were key reasons for non-use, and that the helpfulness of staff impacted on the perception of services as useful. The paper concludes by recommending a reconsideration of current practices to move towards a model of student support service provision in which the student is at the centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal reforms in higher education have resulted in corporate managerial practices in universities and a drive for efficiency and productivity in teaching and research. As a result, there has been an intensification of academic work, increased stress for academics and an emphasis on accountability and performativity in universities. This paper critically examines these developments in institutions and draws on evidence from universities across the sector and a detailed case study in one university to identify the impacts of these changes on academic work. Given its ubiquity and the link of academic productivity to institutional experience, the paper argues that assumptions underpinning academic performance management need to be rethought to recognise the fundamentally intrinsic motivational nature of academic work. The paper explores the effects of performance management on individual academics as a case study in one institution and proposes a re-design of academic performance management to improve productivity based on the evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a research project which aimed to rank Australian higher education institutions on their 'equity performance'; that is, the extent to which they were accessible for, supportive of and benefiting students traditionally under-represented in higher education. The study comprised a conceptual consideration of how higher education equity might be defined and empirically measured, drawing on extant scholarly research as well as observations from key stakeholders, including equity practitioners, researchers, policymakers and higher education executives and institutional planners. Based on these findings, a theoretical framework for higher education equity performance was constructed, and performance indicators identified and subjected to systematic assessment for real-world application. The ensuing ranking system was populated with institutional data from the 37 public universities in Australia. The findings from this analysis indicate that a ranking system may not be the optimal method for assessing higher education equity performance and highlights the subjective nature of both higher education equity and higher education ranking systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the professional development needs of leaders in response to emergent demands for leadership and competing pressures within the changing landscape of Australian international education. Framed within Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus, this study addresses five dimensions of professional development needs reported by leaders in international education: understanding of and skills to work across cultural differences, knowledge of and expertise to respond to policy changes and emergent trends, leadership and management skills targeted for internationalisation, networking and relationship management skills to work with increasingly diverse and 'non-traditional' stakeholders and research skills. However, the social field in which these leaders are functioning is causing tensions for their continuing professional development, including existing institutional governance and structures, financial constraints and the institutional culture that has not put internationalisation on the top of institutional development agenda. The study indicates a critical need for tackling obstacles and supporting sustainable situated professional learning for these leaders so as to enhance their capacities and impact as key players in international education. This study provides empirical and theoretical insights for institutions involved in international education to build effective policies and practices for enhancing professional development for the sustainable international education leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities have a long history of collecting student feedback using surveys and other mechanisms. The last decade has witnessed a significant shift in how student feedback is systematically collected, analysed, reported, and used by governments and institutions. This shift is due to a number of factors, including changes in government policy related to quality assurance, and the increased use of the results by various stakeholders such as governments, institutions, and potential students and employers. The collection, analysis, and reporting of results are systematically carried out in many institutions worldwide. However, how to use student feedback to effectively improve student learning experience remains an issue to be addressed. This paper will contribute to this debate by comparing how Australian and Scottish universities use student feedback results to inform improvements. Based on thematic analysis of external quality audit reports of all Australian and Scottish universities, this paper suggests that universities have systematic processes to collect student feedback using a range of mechanisms, but limited work is done to use the data to inform improvements. This paper argues the need for universities to genuinely listen to student voice by facilitating partnership between students and institutions to act on their feedback as part of quality assurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia has been very successful in recruiting international students. The Australian government regularly reports students' high levels of satisfaction with their educational experiences; however, there is also evidence of some dissatisfaction with regard to social and educational experiences. This paper explores the extent to which universities are meeting the social and educational needs of international students by analysing their experiences through the two dominate rationales in international education, namely neoliberal and cosmopolitan rationales. It discusses findings from a project examining the perceptions and experiences of international students at a large metropolitan Australian university. The study was conducted in two phases: an online questionnaire, followed by focus group interviews. The findings indicate that while international students might rate their overall satisfaction as high on questionnaires, deeper analysis through focus groups highlights the lack of social integration and belongingness that international students perceive. These results challenge universities to innovate their practices in order to develop and integrate cosmopolitan experiences that not only may benefit students but also assist in sustaining the neoliberal rationale of the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accuracy and consistency of peer marking, particularly when students have the power to reward (or penalise) during formative and summative assessment regimes, is largely unknown. The objective of this study is to evaluate students' ability and behaviour in marking their peers' teamwork performance in a collaborative group assessment context both when the mark is counted and not counted towards their final grade. Formative and summative assessment data were obtained from 98 participants in anonymous self and peer assessment of team members' contributions to a group assessment in business courses. The findings indicate that students are capable of accurately and consistently judging their peers' performance to a large extent, especially in the formative evaluation of the process component of group work. However, the findings suggest significant peer grading bias when peer marks contribute to final grades. Overall, findings suggest that students are reluctant to honestly assess their peers when they realise that their actions can penalise non-contributing students. This raises questions about the appropriateness of using peer marks for summative assessment purposes. To overcome the problems identified, this paper proposes a number of measures to guide educators in effectively embedding summative peer assessment in a group assessment context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks the question: do people with different levels of research productivity and identification as a researcher think of research differently? It discusses a study that differentiated levels of research productivity among English and Australian academics working in research-intensive environments in three broad discipline areas: science, engineering and technology; social science and humanities; and medicine and health sciences. The paper explores the different conceptions of research held by these academics in terms of their levels of research productivity, their levels of research training, whether they considered themselves an active researcher and a member of a research team, and their disciplinary differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the number of globally mobile students has expanded, governments are assumed to be consistently and intentionally competing for talent, in what has been called a 'great brain race'. While the notion of competition has become dominant, there is little evidence on long-term policy dynamics in this field, not only across jurisdictions but also over time. We seek to address this gap in this paper through a longitudinal analysis of the politics and public policies impacting international students in four major recruiting countries-Australia, Canada, England and the USA. Through this comparative analysis of the period 2000 to 2016, we demonstrate that international student numbers across the jurisdictions have grown steadily but that this appears to be decoupled from political and policy changes. We also discuss how 'internationalization' initiatives provide an insufficient policy umbrella for policy action on the recruitment and retention of international students. Public policy impacting international students spans multiple government agencies or ministries, encompassing different policy fields. This requires greater policy coordination, which remains elusive for the most part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, research on higher education has increasingly examined the realities of internationalisation, with a particular focus on international students' experiences and internationalisation at home programs. These studies have explored the friendships of international students, including their relationships with both locals and internationals from other countries. However, local students' perspectives and experiences of friendship are largely absent from this literature. The few accounts examining local students' lives explicitly focus on improving their cross-cultural knowledge and engagement, or on rare cases of local-international student friendships. The overriding assumption in this literature is that the understandings and social practises of local students are major barriers to their relationships with internationals. This paper addresses this gap by exploring local students' perspectives on the absence of friendships with their international peers. We utilise findings from a research project on internationalisation at home, involving interviews and focus groups with local and international students and staff at an Australian university. Focusing on locals' discussions of potential friendships with internationals, we propose that these missing friendships are an important area of study. We find that these friendships are missing for several interrelated reasons: local-international friendships are considered unnecessary and are therefore unimagined by locals, who tend to assume that similarity and affinity naturally lead to friendships, and the structures and spaces that might facilitate friendships are absent. Ultimately, uncovering why these friendships are missing sheds fuller light on how relationships might be facilitated, potentially informing and improving universities' internationalisation initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has highlighted the occurrence of isomorphic tendencies-convergences in terms of formal organizational structure-in higher education systems in times of uncertainty and under external pressure to change. It has been repeatedly claimed that the Australian university system largely followed a logic of isomorphic change in the aftermath of radical national policy reform of the late 1980s. Yet to date, there is a lack of comprehensive empirical studies testing this thesis. Addressing this lacuna, and drawing on a range of university and government data, this paper tracks and analyses: (a) changes in the formal academic organizational structures existing at all public Australian universities and (b) changes in the numbers of academic staff and students in different academic organizational groupings over the period of 1987-1991. Despite some limitations in the available data, our system-level analysis finds that there was clear and significant convergence in terms of formal organizational structures and student and staff numbers in the majority of academic fields that were taught and researched at Australian universities at that time. We also draw attention to some conceptual limitations of existing accounts of isomorphic change in Australia and outline trajectories for future research supplementing the system-level analysis presented here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider whether certain countries are particularly adept (or particularly poor) at getting children from disadvantaged homes to study for a bachelor's degree. A series of university access models are estimated for four English-speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and the USA), which include controls for comparable measures of academic achievement at age 15. Our results suggest that socioeconomic differences in university access are more pronounced in England and Canada than Australia and the USA and that cross-national variation in the socioeconomic gap remains even once we take account of differences in academic achievement. We discuss the implications of our findings for the creation of more socially mobile societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper makes three claims: first that regulatory state making and market making in higher education is intertwined through a project of market citizenship that shapes the 'publicness' of higher education. Second, we argue that these projects of market citizenship are variegated and in Australia has taken the form of accommodation-via regulation tools-between social democratic and market elements, and finally we argue that the effect of this new regulatory state is a strategy to depoliticise the governance of higher education. Policy making appears to be the application of a set of technical rules rather than political decisions about the allocation of values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes an innovative approach. We have used the idea of converting international evidence of the size of higher education externalities as a proportion of GDP into Australian-specific dollar equivalents and added these estimates to estimates of lifetime fiscal returns to graduates. This allows us to estimate the expected spillovers over a graduate's lifetime, an opportunity that has so far not been taken elsewhere. We conclude that an additional year of higher education in an Australian context, valued at the time of a student's enrolment, lies between $10,635 and $15,952 in 2014 terms. We also acknowledge that it is difficult and inappropriate to apply estimates of average externalities to issues related to public sector pricing. However, having some idea of the boundaries of the potential sizes of higher education spillovers is a valuable and interesting exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian Government participation targets recommended in the Review of Australian Higher Education (Bradley In Review of Australian higher education: Final report, Commonwealth of Australia ) presented a complex public communication challenge to higher education participation. This research discusses the content of communication messages about Australian universities propagated in the period following the implementation of new national student participation goals. It argues that despite the stated policy objectives and increasing public rhetoric about broadening access to university such messages continued to position universities as elite and exclusive, while vocational training colleges continued to be promoted as having less rigorous academic standards suited to those who aspire to develop trade employment skills. Australian universities are part of a wider communication system that includes other tertiary education organisations including the vocational education sector, State and Federal Governments and the news and information media. The communication of messages about the value of higher education and differences between institutions in this system contributes to the formation of public beliefs and attitudes. The paper argues that the persistence of communication practices and messages that promote the superiority of university and the low success rates of students from disadvantaged backgrounds contributes to the persistence of entrenched views about post-secondary education. The limited discursive framing of university education in Australia in those messages is likely to prevent universities from increasing the participation rates of students from non-traditional higher education backgrounds and thus undermine national educational and associated economic goals, while contributing to an increasing social divide where educational achievement is the fault line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last couple of years have witnessed a growing debate about online learning in higher education, notably in response to the global massive open online course (MOOC) phenomenon. This paper explores these developments from an institutional policy perspective, drawing on an analysis of the initial stages of different approaches to MOOCs and e-learning being taken up at three Australian universities. It points to four commonalities emerging from the institutional constructions of these initiatives including (1) the use of e-learning policy as a vehicle for curriculum redesign; (2) an emphasis on internal curriculum redesign as a core rationale for MOOCs; (3) a desire to capitalise on promotional opportunities but a reticence around wholly embracing the concept and structure of MOOCs and (4) the absence of access-driven concerns in university policy despite the prominence of such concerns in broader public debate. The approach is framed by a consideration of change dynamics in higher education and highlights the emphasis on internal university work within the policy narrative, suggesting this could represent an attempt to reframe the debate about MOOCs away from popular arguments about systemic disruption and instead use them to progress forms of change that align to broader strategic objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]