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Higher education in Europe has undergone remarkable transformations over the last two decades. Germany is a very interesting case in point here. While the country was labeled as a laggard in the process, over the last decade the pace of higher education reforms in Germany has grown considerably. This paper will focus on the by now visible effects of these remarkable transformations, which have led to numerous consequences that go beyond the explicit intentions of policy-makers. Unintended consequences resulting from rapid institutional change will be discussed with regard to research, third-mission activities, and structural reforms concerning governance and organization. It can be assumed that, due to a variety of such unintended consequences, also in other European countries the next decade will be shaped by efforts aiming at reforming the reforms, re-regulating the significant changes brought about during the last two decades. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the necessary linkages to three related interdisciplinary research areas, from which both higher education research and policy-making will benefit, and a summary of the main points of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the features of the Soviet higher education system that have been crucial to the formation of the current system and then focus on the main changes that it has endured in the past 20 years. We pay special attention to the current challenges in the sphere of higher education and the counter-measures taken by the government and the academic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapidly shifting higher education policy agenda in the aftermath of the students' movement of 2011 in Chile and its mismatch with Chile's research capacities in the field of higher education studies are analyzed to illustrate how research is path dependent on policy. I argue that a stable policy environment, where change is only marginal or incremental, begets research problems and questions squarely situated within the boundaries of the established rules of the game. Conversely, whenever policy swerves considerably off its expected path, knowledge may not be available to illuminate policy-making. The motif of disassociation between the policy field in the making with the availability of knowledge to support it is probed via the analysis of two policy proposals currently in Chile's new government agenda: introducing tuition-free higher education and assuming greater state oversight of teacher education programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]