Graduate views on access to higher education: is it really a case of pulling up the ladder?

Using as a starting point in the recent work of Mountford-Zimdars et al., the authors analyse attitudes towards expanding higher education (HE) opportunities in the UK. The authors propose that the approach of Mountford-Zimdars et al. is flawed not only in its adoption of a multivariate logistic regression but also in its interpretation of results. The authors make a number of adaptations, chief among them being the use of an ordered probit approach and the addition of a time dimension to test for changes in attitudes between 2000 and 2010. The authors find that attitudes towards HE expansion have intensified during the decade 2000–2010, but the authors uncover no evidence that this is due to graduates wanting to ‘pull up the ladder’, as suggested by Mountford-Zimdars et al. The authors argue that evidence of a widespread desire to reduce access to HE can most likely be explained by social congestion theory, internal institutional disaffection and rising tuition fees

Mid-Career academic women and the prestige economy

Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with women academics based in London higher education institutions in the UK, this paper investigates the gendered nature of the prestige economy in academia. We explore how mid-career academic women strategise their career development and the opportunities and barriers they perceive, particularly in relation to the accrual of academic esteem. Concept maps were used to facilitate dialogue about career plans and provided an artefact from the interviewee’s own perspective. The analysis draws on the concept of prestige, or the indicators of esteem that help advance academic careers, against the backdrop of a higher education context which increasingly relies on quantitative data to make judgements about academic excellence. The interviews indicated that women generally feel that men access status and indicators of esteem more easily than they do. Many women also had ambivalent feelings about gaining recognition through prestige: they understood the importance of status and knew the ‘rules of the game’, but were critical of these rules and sometimes reluctant to overtly pursue prestige. The findings are valuable for understanding how women’s slow access to the highest levels of higher education institutions is shaped by the value that organisations place on individual status

Exploring the potential of using undergraduates’ knowledge, skills and experience in research methods as a proxy for capturing learning gain

Learning gain is a politicised concept within contemporary HE, and as such has been aligned with agendas of teaching excellence and learning outcomes but the extent to which it captures actual learning has yet to be clarified. Here, we report the outcomes of a learning gain study which examines how students’ knowledge, skills and experiences as researchers develops throughout their studies. We examine data from a self-reporting survey administered across a university and college-based HE providers during students’ second year of undergraduate study. The data highlight disciplinary differences in student engagement with research methods and the significance of perceived relevance of research methods to students’ learning. These findings do have a bearing on the development of measures of learning gain as they are demonstrating the complexity of capturing student learning across disciplines. Our findings can be employed to develop a method of capturing learning gain that can be integrated into undergraduates’ research methods education

Charting the elements of pedagogic frailty

Background: The concept of pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching improvement within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on four key areas that are thought to impede development. Purpose: The variation in internal structure of the four dimensions of pedagogic frailty and the links that have been proposed to connect them are explored here through the analysis of interviews with academics working in a variety of disciplinary areas. Methods: The application of concept map-mediated interviews allows us to view the variable connections within and between these dimensions and the personal ways they are conceptualised by academics working across the heterogeneous university context. Results: The data show that academics conceptualise the discourse of teaching in various ways that have implications for the links that may be developed to integrate the elements within the model. Conclusions: Whilst the form and content of the maps representing dimensions of the pedagogic frailty model exhibit considerable variation, it is suggested that factors such as academic resilience and the explicit use of integrative concepts within disciplines may help to overcome some of the vulnerabilities that accompany pedagogic frailty. The data also raises questions about the links between factors that tend to be under individual control and those that tend towards institutional control

Indicators of esteem: gender and prestige in academic work

The continued gender imbalance in senior positions in higher education is a problem that persists despite decades of feminist research and publications in the area, as well as interventions in many countries to promote the advancement of women. In this article we view the issue of gender inequality through the lens of the prestige economy, which suggests that academics are motivated by prestige factors accrued through advancement in their careers. Prestige, authority and status, we suggest, may be more easily acquired by male academics. We draw on a case study of one institution in the Republic of Ireland, including data from a survey on academic careers (n = 269), to explore how the concept of prestige is gendered. We explore the cumulative effect of four themes: homosociability; non-transparency of criteria; academic workload balance; and self-promotion

The Student-as-Consumer Approach in Higher Education and its Effects on Academic Performance

Students studying at universities in England have been defined as customers by the government since the introduction of student tuition fees (Dearing et al., 1997). Although this approach has been rejected by educators, there is a lack of empirical evidence about the extent to which students express a consumer orientation on academic performance. These issues were examined in the current study by surveying 608 undergraduates at Higher Education Institutions in England about their consumer attitudes and behaviours, learner identity, grade goal and academic performance. The analysis revealed that consumer orientation mediated traditional relationships between learner identity and grade goal on academic performance, and found that a higher consumer orientation was associated with lower academic performance. Furthermore, higher responsibility for payment of tuition fees and studying a STEM subject were associated with a higher consumer orientation and subsequently lower academic performance. Implications for academic performance are discussed