527
Views
0
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Letter from the editors

Letter from the editors

ORCID Icon & ORCID Icon

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome back to our final issue of 2019 after a highly successful Special Issue on ‘Employability and employment outcomes as drivers of higher education practice’, guest-edited by Associate Professors Ruth Bridgstock and Denise Jackson. If you have not yet done so, please check out the eight articles which each have an explicit emphasis on policy and practice. Thanks also to our Special Issues Editor Dr Heather Davis who is integral to maintaining the journal’s engagement with practice through our special issues.

Keep an eye out for our next journal issue which will look back at the past decade of the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, celebrating 40 years since its first publication in 1979.

With so much quality content in the previous issue and throughout this year, our final issue for the year is relatively shorter with five articles. The first, by Croucher and colleagues, analyses the role of Chinese students in financing Australian universities. It will surprise no one that China is Australia’s most important international student revenue source, but their results also show a roughly $3,000 (AUD) per head revenue premium for Chinese over non-Chinese international students and greater concentration in research-intensive metropolitan campuses.

Part-time, distance-based and jointly-taught degree programs are at the leading edge of university experimentation with alternatives to the traditional on-campus degree. However, gaining consistency across partners in different schools/departments is challenging, even for well-established programs. Sbaffi and Bennet explore the implications for student learning through a mixed-methods study of a distance learning, postgraduate course at a UK Russel Group university.

Slaughter and Leslie’s highly influential 1997 book Academic Capitalism placed Canada as an Anglo country deviant (particularly relative to Australia), retaining strong academic oligarchy control and public funding. This has changed over the past two decades with greater marketisation and managerialism. Farshid Shams examines the tensions between academic norms (e.g. collegiality, academic freedom) and the growing need to comply with the managerial requirements (e.g. outcome-oriented evaluation) at a Canadian university.

Australia was a first-mover in academic capitalism and fragmentation of the academic profession, but many universities still retain a formal commitment to a 40:40:20 academic workload (teaching, research and administration/service). Julia Millar asks, ‘Where does the time go?’ and over a three-month case study shows, predictably, that the formal 40:40:20 workload doesn’t fit the academic experience.

Finally, Beres and colleagues outline the comprehensive whole of campus approach to preventing sexual violence at the University of Otago. Universities around the world are facing increasing pressure to ensure safety for students and staff. The Otago Model offers a balanced and relevant example for addressing this complex topic.

We hope you enjoy reading these articles and wish you all the best for the upcoming new year.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.