Education

It was particular joy to meet again in person at the General Conference of the European Consortium of Politics Research (ECPR) last week 22-26 August. After two years of virtual conferences due to Covid, this time the ECPR General Conference took place in the beautiful city of Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. It brought together […]

The ‘take back control’ slogan of the Brexit campaign did not resonate with academics and students, for whom, on the contrary, access to EU-wide resources, capabilities and talent signified empowerment and agency.

Marina Cino Pagliarello The implementation of a common Higher Education policy has been a long-standing objective of the European Union (Corbett, 2005). The launch of the Bologna Process in 1999 with its aim of creating a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the establishment of the European Research Area (ERA) have been important drivers in […]

Kasja Weenink The study ‘We’re stubborn enough to create our own world’ (Weenink, Aarts, & Jacobs, 2021) addresses how directors of educational programs understand and enact higher education quality in interdependence with its environment. It reveals that the directors’ room to play out their quality views depends on their position within the academic hierarchy and […]

Martina Vukasovic In 2015 the Norwegian government launched a large-scale re-organisation in higher education. The policy solution proposed, like in many other cases, involved mergers of higher education institutions. There were several formal policy goals, such as robust academic environments, good access to education and expertise, contribution to regional development and effective use of resources. […]

Pradeep Singh and Bowen Xu The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) had its second virtual General Conference held between 30th August – 3rd September 2021. This year ECPR has attracted over 2,400 scholars worldwide participating in 66 sections covering a wide range of topics and presentations. For the ECPR Standing Group on Knowledge Politics and […]

Alexander Mitterle Working in academia comes with adapting to different timeframes: some universities use semesters, others quarters or terms. A course at a German university can be timed in semester weekly hours (SWS) or in credit points. In both cases they differ – with a usual time-span of 45 minutes – from the U.S. equivalent: […]

Alina Felder Convening virtually over the course of three days (30 June – 2 July 2021), twelve PhD students from six countries exchanged about current research and challenges to researching the area of higher education. The workshop on ‘European higher education in times of uncertainty’ comprised two keynote lectures by senior researchers – Jeroen Huisman […]

Priya Vijaykumar Poojary The current political shifts in the form of increasing populism, the resurgence of nationalism, structural racism, and the pandemic are altering global political environments. These shifts are occurring in tangent with the internationalization of higher education as we witness new regional higher educational models (both intra- and inter) and increasing cross-border academic […]

Alina Felder European higher education institutions are receiving substantial attention in various areas of EU policy making. They are expected to foster excellence in research, mobility in education and cohesion through cross-border exchange. Yet, the interrelationship of these different governance sites for a Europe of Knowledge (Gornitzka 2010) appears under investigated. While higher education policy […]