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Expectations around success in academia vary, and early career academics often receive conflicting messages about what they should concentrate on to achieve promotion or tenure. Taking a social constructionist approach, this paper considers the constructs of objective and subjective career success in academia and shares the perspectives of early career academics in three countries in relation to these narratives. Key findings are that objective career success in academia dominates the literature but remains ill-defined in the minds of the early career academics to whom the measures are applied, and that subjective career success in academia needs both more research attention and more consideration in promotion, tenure, and workload deliberations and policies.

Student success, variously understood as engagement, persistence, completion, graduation and entry to employment, has become a central focus for stakeholders in higher education. Theoretical and empirical research exploring these varied conceptions has mushroomed since the 1980s. Much of this literature focuses on what and how higher education institutions contribute to student success; a substantial amount also reports on the part students play in their own success. Less frequently studies investigate how non-institutional influences affect student success. This article addresses this gap. It uses data from a survey of first-time enrolled students in New Zealand higher education to investigate the importance of family, cultural, employment and personal influences on student perceptions of success. Findings show that non-institutional influences exert a moderate effect on student success, and that they are influences which need to be considered by institutions interested in fostering student success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central in this study is the role of student variables and the fit between secondary education and university education in the explanation of first-year student achievement. The fit between two levels of education can be defined in different ways. In this study the focus is on four fit-aspects: appropriateness of expectations, and the degree to which there is a continuance with respect to teaching approaches, knowledge and workload. The conceptual model, a synthesis of the Model of Student Attrition, the Educational Productivity Model and the Transition Model, is tested with structural equation modelling, based on maximum likelihood estimation. The results indicate that the fit between secondary and university education, in terms of resemblance between the learning environments and experience of some adjustment, as well as social integration, student employment and motivation, affect first-year achievement indirectly through time investment. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the predictive correlations between results from the New Zealand National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), a standards-based qualification, and university grade point averages achieved by first-year students in one large New Zealand University (and, for comparison purposes, also presents correlations from the Cambridge International Examinations [CIE], an international norm-referenced system delivered in New Zealand, and university grade point averages achieved by first-year students who entered with that qualification). The study then evaluates alternative models for university entrance, using different attributes of the qualifications for possible entry criteria, and ascertains the implications of the best of these models for different groups of students. The best alternative model gives greater weight to excellence and merit in NCEA results, and less weight to credit accumulation at minimum pass rates. A combination of this alternative model and the current model provides a merit-based admissions system which would potentially increase the number of students from groups under-represented in university education in New Zealand (students from Maori and Pacific ethnicities and from schools in lower socio-economic communities), who are admitted with no necessary decline in the success rate during first-year university study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]