International student mobility has traditionally witnessed a global South-North pattern. In recent years, a shift has occurred as the appeal of alternative geographies waxes, with Malaysia being an exemplar of inbound student mobility destination. To facilitate a deep probe of the under-researched global South-South student mobility, this study utilized a qualitative method to delve into 10 Chinese doctoral students' emic perceptions of their sojourn in Malaysia. Guided by a theoretical framework incorporating decolonization and recolonization, this study unpacks how these sociohistorical forces penetrate into and shape the students' preparation and navigation of a doctoral sojourn. Findings of the study reveal that while taking advantage of the Southern niche to yield commensurate benefits, thereby delegitimizing the Western supremacy, the students' make-do mentality and self-subjugating resistance inadvertently reinforce the Western dominance. Besides, these macro effects generate interlocking and conflicting affective consequences, instilling simultaneously positivity and inclusivity, inferiority, and anxiety. Altogether, decolonization and recolonization are concretely registered at the emotional level and bear a broader social significance. This article concludes with an alert and a call to address covert yet compelling inequalities in international student mobility.

This study aimed to characterise academics' conceptions of teaching in fully online undergraduate distance education courses with no on-campus component. The study aimed to fill a gap in the literature, as previous research had examined conceptions of teaching in face-to-face courses, with a few studies of blended teaching via the Internet in on-campus courses. Fourteen academics from five faculties in a Vietnamese regional university were interviewed, with the study taking place shortly after the outbreak of Covid-19. Grounded theory was used for data analysis. The results revealed four categories of conceptions of online teaching, namely online teaching (1) as transmitting structured knowledge and skills, (2) as guiding students to acquire knowledge and skills, (3) as facilitating students' understanding via interaction and (4) as developing students' understanding and capabilities. The four categories of conceptions were defined and distinguished by a set of six dimensions, which included e-Learning/LMS. The set of categories had some similarities to those found for face-to-face teaching, but also some distinctions which could be explained by the nature of online teaching and learning. The study, therefore, makes a major contribution by establishing a category scheme for conceptions of teaching in online distance education, with detailed characterisation of the four categories of conceptions. The descriptors of the conceptions showed cultural influences, particularly from a Confucian heritage, which is of significance as research into face-to-face conceptions had not found cultural variations.

Teaching and learning in higher education is informed by a multitude of conditioning factors, not least the values systems and outlook of academics. Understanding the epistemological positioning taken by academics in relation to teaching and learning is therefore important if we are to make judgments about how we educate now, and could do so in the future. Developments in educational theory and digital technology have opened-up new possibilities for the ways in which students learn, and to a degree this has been accelerated by the responses from universities to the COVID-19 pandemic. How then should we conceive the future? Heutagogy is one of a number of theoretical approaches that has attracted interest from those who wish to see greater student control over the learning journey- but how widespread is this view amongst academics? This paper reports on a qualitative study in which 12 academics in an English Business School were asked to describe their views on teaching and learning, which we can encapsulate through the concept of epistemic cognition. The findings infer that there is little epistemological underpinning for heutagogy and that if academics are going to innovate, then additional resource and professional development should be put in place to support epistemic reflexivity, and a shift in their epistemological positioning. The paper conceptualises academics' positioning through a typology of epistemic views.

To keep up with technological advances and macro-economic trends, higher education has increasingly focused on developing students' employability competences through mentoring programs. However, measuring the effectiveness of such mentoring programs has remained difficult, because many mentoring measurements are not validated or grounded in theory. Furthermore, existing questionnaires have mostly focused on one or two types of support, ignoring the wide variety of support types offered by a mentor. Therefore, the current study's aim was to develop and validate a new questionnaire measuring various types of mentoring support. Based on a systematic literature review, a 35-item questionnaire was developed and data were collected from mentoring programs at four higher education institutions. Data were analyzed through exploratory factor analysis ( = 225), confirmatory factor analysis ( = 208), and cross-validation ( = 101). The results support a 6-factor model (21 items) that is statistically valid and reliable for use in universities (of applied sciences). The model includes the following factors, referring to types of support and their features: trust and availability, emotional support, networking support, autonomy support, similarity, and empathy. This questionnaire makes an original contribution insofar as (1) it is based on a sound, theoretical framework, and (2) it was demonstrated to be valid and reliable across different sub-populations in higher education. The questionnaire provides educational practitioners with a sound and valid tool to evaluate the quality of their mentoring program. It can also be used to assess what types of support could be offered to a greater extent.

In higher education institutions, critical race theory (CRT) is known to be associated with fields that study racial disparities or systemic oppression such as law, education, and ethnic studies. The impression that CRT is unrelated to fields like business or computer science may have led scholars and practitioners from these disciplines to put their focus on elsewhere than on racial inequality and its implication in their research and practice, despite apparent need. To counter such fallacy, this review article-focusing primarily on the US context-discusses CRT literature in fields where its presence is less known which are nevertheless among the major domains of higher education institutions: health sciences, computer science and information technology, sports, business, and religion. By discussing example research of how scholars have utilized CRT in different fields to challenge the race-neutral thinking that often obscures structural racism, this paper exposes racism's ability to alter manifestations and to appear through various shapes and forms within the higher education context. Initial recommendations on how educators may engage in further discussions or actions will also be considered. This paper concludes that racist ideologies are often hidden behind discipline-specific vocabulary or technical language, and it is by tackling the ideologies at work underneath the technicalities can we address the chameleon-like nature of racism more effectively.

Selecting a major is one of the most consequential decisions a student will make in college. Though major selection is often conceived of as a discrete choice made at a particular point in time, many students change their majors at least once during college. This article examines the process of changing majors as a key education transition. Drawing from 38 interviews with college students at a public university in the USA who changed their declared major, this study explores the ways they make meaning of transitions between fields of study. Specifically, I ask: How do students describe their experiences navigating the process of switching college majors? Six themes emerged in relation to three phases of transition: endings, neutral zones, and new beginnings. These themes provide new understandings of students' meaning making about their experiences moving between majors. In doing so, this study (1) demonstrates the value of studying major change as an important educational transition and (2) sheds light on the potential for employing theories of transition to understand non-normative and non-linear transitions in higher education. Implications for higher education research and practice are discussed.

Empirical research on international student migrants has sometimes homogenised this group, framing it as predominantly made up of privileged members of the global middle-class. This has led to calls to acknowledge and address the precarity faced by international students in their respective host countries more comprehensively. This study aims to explore how levels of financial precarity vary among international students in Australia, and how this in turn contributes to varying levels of precariousness in the personal spheres of students' lives. In doing so, we centre and refine the concept of precarity for use in studies of internationally mobile students, arguing for its use as a 'relational nexus', bridging financial precarity and broader lived experiences. Drawing on a large-scale survey and semi-structured interviews with 48 students, we emphasise the linkages between financial precarity and precariousness as a socio-ontological experience, explored through the examples of time poverty, physical and mental wellbeing, and relationships.

Previous studies on Chinese overseas students have generally presumed a smooth transition from mobility to mobility capital and have lacked an ethnic perspective. In this study, we adopt mobility capital as an analytical lens to explore the life trajectories of a group of Tibetans with studying abroad experiences. Drawing on qualitative data through multiple methods, we find a shift from collective-oriented expectations regarding studying abroad to individualist life planning and lifestyles after returning to work in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Before studying abroad, the informants viewed such experiences as important capital that could be later used to make a change for the Tibetan group, their local societies, and the state. Those views met a different reality after returning to TAR because the informants generally felt they were being viewed as potentially risk subjects in the workplace, which significantly impeded the capitalization of educational mobility at the institutional level. However, the informants developed coping strategies to find self-worth in private life by capitalizing on educational mobility. By addressing the subjective experiences of Tibetan informants in TAR and their associations with institutional contexts, this article not only engages an ethnicity-sensitive perspective to understand the politics of international educational mobility but also extends the discussion on individuals' experiences of educational mobility to the successional stage upon returning to their home societies. This article ultimately emphasizes the need for more culturally and politically reflexive policies that can sustain the flow of ethnic talents and help them realize their self-worth.

This paper applies Appadurai's notion of scapes in globalisation to study international student mobility. Thirty mainland Chinese students were interviewed; the majority of whom studied at prestigious institutions in the West before enrolling in their current PhD programmes at a research-intensive university in Hong Kong (HK) in the immediate aftermath of HK's large-scale social protests and amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. We seek to understand why these students relocated to HK to further their studies given these turbulent circumstances and how their mainlander identity and sojourns in the West influence their perceptions of HK's social movements from the perspectives of ethnoscape and ideoscape, respectively. Our findings reveal that HK represented the 'best' compromise for our participants, mitigating their nostalgia for home (i.e. mainland China) whilst offering a superior education to the Chinese mainland. Most participants perceived HK as a nationalistic ideoscape, wherein HK people's pursuit of autonomy is subordinated to the putative Chinese national interests. Moreover, ethnoscape and ideoscape dynamics were found to crisscross other scapes. Generous scholarships (i.e. financescape) provided additional incentives driving student relocations. The persistent consumption of Chinese social media (techno-mediascape) was found to have resulted in worldview conformity between our participants and the Chinese state.

In China, higher education institutions (HEIs) have a governance arrangement in which the university president and the party secretary occupy key roles. However, their legal roles as institutional leaders are vaguely specified in existing legal frameworks. Based on a four-dimensional theoretical model, this paper (i) clarifies the leadership roles in the dual governance structure, (ii) explores how HEI leaders (i.e. presidents and party secretaries) perceive their leadership, and (iii) applies the unique Chinese practices as a valuable test bed for critical reflections on how existing theoretical models of leadership are relevant in Chinese contexts. Through in-depth interviews with six top-level leaders from six Chinese public HEIs, our findings indicate that Chinese HEI leaders apply more structural than symbolic dimensions in their leadership practices. Whereas studies on institutional leadership conducted outside China tend to highlight the symbolic dimensions of leadership practices, our study suggests that top-level Chinese HEI leaders may assume the role of university managers rather than institutional leaders. We offer some reflections on the relevance of existing theoretical models of leadership and suggest the directions for further theoretical enhancement.

Globally, scholarships for international higher education play a critical role in human capital development. While substantial research has documented the benefits such scholarships provide for individuals, their impact on the creation of pathways for social change remains under-researched. This paper bridges this gap by examining the extent to which a government scholarship for international education has created pathways for social change in Kazakhstan. Data were collected through interviews with 67 scholarship alumni. Drawing on Dassin et al.'s (2018) framework for pathways to social change, the findings reveal that international education fosters social change in Kazakhstan in four ways. First, the scholarship program develops local talent and builds agents of change. Second, it widens access to international education, particularly for individuals from marginalized communities, who would otherwise lack access owing to their scarce financial resources. Third, the program develops alumni's cosmopolitan and intercultural competencies and strengthens international collaborations. Finally, it creates associations and groups through which alumni can collectively contribute to society. The findings highlight that while the interviewed alumni foster strong patriotic feelings and are determined to contribute to the prosperity of their country, underdeveloped industries, economic volatility, and top-down bureaucracy in workplaces limit their potential contributions to social changes. These findings may help policymakers and administrators to reconsider and improve on the design and structure of scholarship programs.

The rapid growth of international student mobility has attracted much research on the many benefits it offers to students, higher education institutions, and societies in general. However, studies on the costs and potential tribulations caused by mobility are comparatively rare, despite increasing evidence of such costs inherent in the marketization of higher education. Furthermore, the few existing studies are predominantly framed in terms of consumerism and the commodification of education, but they give less attention to mobility in the context of wider social issues. The climate crisis is foremost among such social impacts, with the extensive air travel inherent in global mobility patterns causing significant damage, combined with curricula, pedagogies, and institutional strategy that are either ambivalent or contradictory on the climate crisis. This paper examines international student mobility in European higher education to better understand how the environmental costs of higher education can be conceptualized in policy and practice. It contrasts policies and practices that promote international student mobility in Europe-in which mobility has aspects of what are commonly referred to as "public goods"-with initiatives that promote mobility to Europe, which illustrate a historic and ongoing entanglement between European colonialism, higher education, and climate change. It concludes with reflections on possibilities for greater sustainability in international student mobility in Europe.

This study explores dissatisfaction and neutrality metrics from 12 years of a national-level undergraduate student survey. The notion of dissatisfaction is much less prevalent in the narratives surrounding student survey outcomes, and the underpinning metrics are seldom considered. This is despite an increasingly vociferous debate about 'value for money' of higher education and the positioning of students as consumers in a marketised sector. We used machine learning methods to explore over 2.7 million national survey outcomes from 154 institutions to describe year-on-year stability in the survey items that best predicted dissatisfaction and neutrality, together with their similarity to known metric predictors of satisfaction. The widely publicised annual increases in student 'satisfaction' are shown to be the result of complex reductions in the proportions of disagreement and neutrality across different survey dimensions. Due to the widespread use of survey metrics in university league tables, we create an anonymised, illustrative table to demonstrate how UK institutional rankings would have differed if dissatisfaction metrics had been the preferred focus for reporting. We conclude by debating the tensions of balancing the provision of valuable information about dissatisfaction, with perpetuating negative impacts that derive from this important subset of the survey population.

Doctoral writing has burgeoned as a field of inquiry in the past decade. However, questions still remain as to how doctoral researchers navigate their writing trajectories, the strategies they deploy to deal with challenges, and what and who helps to shape their writing experiences. These questions may have resulted from the rather snapshot perspective followed by some existing research, failing to reveal developmental aspects of doctoral writing. This article argues that a trajectorial perspective on doctoral writing, offered here as a methodological lens, can help to shed some light on such questions, and provide effective guidance for pedagogic interventions. A group of six doctoral researchers were interviewed about their experiences as academic and professional writers, and about the texts they had written along their writing trajectories. An analysis of the data revealed a number of challenges these doctoral writers faced at specific stages of their writing trajectory, the strategies they deployed to deal with these challenges, the relationships they established along the way and how they changed at specific times, and what they have found most helpful to advance their writing. Based on the results, this exploratory study offers possible pedagogic interventions for specific stages of the doctoral writing trajectory.

WeChat is a highly popular social media in China and many other Asian countries, but little is known about its effectiveness in facilitating international students' academic and social functioning. Hence, the present study aimed to examine causal or reciprocal relationships among WeChat usage intensity, behavioral engagement in academic learning (BE-academic) and in local social activities (BE-social), and academic and social adjustment. To this end, we employed a three-wave longitudinal design among international students in China with data collected at three times (i.e., Time 1 data collected in December of 2020, Time 2 data collected in March of 2021, and Time 3 data collected in June of 2021). Results based on the cross-lagged panel analyses indicated that in academic domains, WeChat usage intensity positively predicted longitudinal changes in BE-academic and academic adjustment positively predicted longitudinal changes in WeChat usage intensity across Time 1 and Time 3. In social domains, WeChat usage intensity positively predicted longitudinal changes in BE-social and social adjustment, and BE-social positively predicted longitudinal changes in social adjustment from Time 1 to Time 2. Additionally, the reverse effects of social adjustment on WeChat usage intensity were revealed across Time 1 and Time 3.

Internationalisation has moved to the core of universities' mission, emphasising the qualitative elements of internationalisation, which is evident in the implementation of an internationalised curriculum. The latter must be implemented following the constructive alignment model; thus, the framework for a is proposed in this article, combining an internationalised curriculum with Biggs' constructive alignment model. Since academics are the owners of an internationalised curriculum and they are determined by their academic disciplines, in this paper, the impact of disciplines on a constructively aligned internationalised curriculum is evaluated, following Biglan's typology of academic disciplines. It was found from the sample of 1367 academics from all Slovenian higher education institutions that an internationalised curriculum is constructively aligned in practice, wherein we observed relevant disciplinary differences in the level/rate of appearance of international perspectives in the individual steps of a constructively aligned internationalised curriculum, with a noticeably higher incidence in the case of soft disciplines. Besides introducing the framework for a constructively aligned internationalised curriculum and identifying relevant differences between disciplines, an important contribution to the research topic is in several other characteristics of academic professions that were identified as having an impact on the implementation of an internationalised curriculum. Examples of these were academics' inclusion in pedagogical courses and academics' various modes of international engagement. The authors also highlight several opportunities for improvement and further research, as well as implications for the enhancement of curriculum internationalisation in hard disciplines.

The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT +) individuals in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are still understudied and, despite some improvements, are still characterised by patterns of exclusion, disadvantage, and discrimination. In this article, we explore how visibility is perceived and navigated by LGBT + academics and PhD students in STEM, with a focus on the ways that interlocking systems of oppression impact people and groups who are marginalised and historically excluded. This article draws on a broader research project about the experiences of women and LGBT + people in STEM that was conducted between 2019 and 2020 at a UK university and is framed by intersectionality theory. Based on the thematic analysis of interviews and focus groups with 24 LGBT + participants, findings suggest that visibility is still a risk for LGBT + academics and PhD students in STEM. We found that the labour of navigating visibility was perceived as an unfair disadvantage and that the focus on individuals' visibility in the absence of meaningful and transformative inclusion initiatives by higher education institutions was regarded as tokenistic. The article argues that addressing LGBT + visibility should firstly be an institutional responsibility and not an individual burden and that this work is essential to set the conditions for personal visibility to happen by choice, safely and without retribution.

The shift to online instruction in higher education related to the COVID-19 pandemic has raised worldwide concerns about an increase in academic misconduct (cheating and plagiarism). However, data to document any increase is sparse. For this study, we collected survey data from 484 students in 11 universities in the USA, and 410 students in five universities in Romania. The data support the conclusions that (1) cheating on exams increased with the shift to online instruction, but plagiarism and cheating on assignments may not have increased, (2) significant differences between the two countries suggest that intervention planning should avoid assuming that results from one context may generalize to another, and (3) influencing student beliefs about rates of AM among their peers may be a fruitful new route for reducing academic misconduct.

As it becomes more crucial to push the boundaries of science to develop new technologies and important global initiatives, internationalization can be instrumental in helping underdeveloped countries overcome challenges such as poverty, climate change, and educational inequalities. Higher education institutions have always faced challenges in the process of internationalization, which have occupied scholarly attention in recent decades, but little research has been conducted on the internationalization of higher education in less developed African countries. This qualitative study aims to shed light on the challenges of internationalization of higher education in low-income countries in East Africa. After reviewing the literature and interviewing academics, the obtained data were thematically analyzed. The results suggested 12 main challenges, which were classified into four major categories. The challenges include a lack of clear policies and guidelines; the inefficiency of the organizational structure of internationalization; financial, infrastructure, and equipment problems; weaknesses in scientific, skill, and language competences; cultural differences; non-reciprocal relationships; and a brain drain. Finally, strategies for responding to these challenges with regard to the internal and external environments of higher education institutions were proposed. Among the internal strategies of higher education institutions are the development of clear policies and visions, planning for the development of human resources, and sustainable budgeting for internationalization programs. External strategies emphasize the development of national policies and laws based on contextual and environmental conditions, as well as interaction and participation in international meetings to expand communication and use the scientific and economic capacities of international agencies and institutions.

Using a dataset of higher education institutional alliances within the framework of the European University initiative (EUi), we test empirically whether the policy-defined goal of a relative balance between and within the scheme has been achieved. Specifically, we provide a descriptive and analytical account of the diversity of the higher education institutions (HEIs) participating in the EUi, the composition of-as well as the mechanisms behind-the formation of individual alliances. We observe that alliance formation activated the deep sociological mechanisms of hierarchisation, with the alliances largely reproducing the existing . Specifically, we argue that the global-level stratification hierarchy cast by rankings influences the participation of individual institutions and-although to a more limited extent-the formation/structure of the alliances. Further, we demonstrate that the EUi has strengthened existing ties since most alliances thus far have built on existing forms of collaboration. However, we also show empirically that some of the distinctive policy design measures, namely the requirement for broad geographical coverage and generically framed rules for participation, as well as opening the initiative to new alliances and encouraging enlargement of the existing ones, have generated opportunities for involvement of the lower-status institutions. This broadened the scope of the EUi beyond the core of top-ranked research universities located in the knowledge production centres of Europe. We suggest that these observations may have important implications for how the intended extension of the EUi may be implemented in the future.

Positive teacher-student relationships have been identified as important for teacher and student well-being and for high-quality teaching and learning processes and outcomes. However, research on the perceptions of teachers in higher education on a high-quality relationship with students and the perceived antecedents is still scarce. This study aimed to address this research gap by interviewing 15 Australian higher education teachers about their perception of forming relationships with first-year students. The results suggest that the quality of the teacher-student relationship comprises both a professional and an interpersonal dimension, reflecting the different roles teachers and students assume within it. These two dimensions can be further differentiated into various relational quality indicators, such as approachability, care, support, trust, and others. Furthermore, the results indicate that several contextual and personal attributes contribute to the development of this relationship. Implications about how to shape positive relationships between teachers and students in higher education are discussed.