The book analyses and evaluates several key community college reform programs that emerged after the Recession of 2008 and as a result of major initiatives in California, New York, Tennessee, Florida, Connecticut and Wisconsin. Because of the economic downturn in the early 21st Century, an already eroding financial base for public higher education saw even further losses. At the same time, enrollments were booming, particularly in the two-year sector where many students who would have traditionally forgone a college education, were now enrolling to ensure their competitiveness in a harsh labor market. Chapters in this book examine the development and implementation of initiatives and accountability measures imposed across the states by the Obama administration, and consider their effectiveness in reducing the impact of the loss of students, and their role in improving courses. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers exploring the history of education in the United States, as well as academic administrators, faculty, and policy-makers with an interest in reform-based practices that have been successfully implemented in community colleges.

The Dispositif of the University Reform presents a discourse analysis about transformations in higher education in Poland. Combining Foucauldian categories of discourse, dispositif and governmentality with contemporary changes in the area of science and higher education, it proposes an analysis of power in close connection with the development of knowledge. The book researches the tradition built on the works of Michel Foucault, one of the most prominent and inspiring researchers for the contemporary humanities. It introduces the Polish context to the international debate on higher education transformations and the reception of Foucauldian categories in social research. In addition, it presents the original concept of the dispositif of the reform as a heuristic model of describing and explaining the practice of regulating academic life and education policy. As a valuable contribution to the knowledge about the legitimization of educational policy and the practice formed by dominant discourses, the book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and post graduate students in the fields of sociology of education, sociology of knowledge, critical pedagogy, public policy, educational studies, and philosophy.

Graduate employability is a significant concern for most higher education institutions worldwide. During the last two decades, universities have attempted to implement their employability agendas to support their students to enhance employment outcomes. However, within today’s globalized labour markets, employability has gone far beyond the notion of obtaining stable and permanent employment. This book explores graduates’ experiences in developing and utilizing employability capitals for career development and success in different labour markets. In the chapters, the graduate contributors narrate and discuss how they negotiated their employability on the transitions across jobs, occupational sectors and labour markets. The chapters address key issues, including how employability is understood by graduates of different disciplines, at different career stages and in different contexts; how they develop and utilise such capitals along with strategies to negotiate their employability; and what can be done to move the higher education employability agenda forward. The book presents international insights and perspectives into transitions from education to work and career development across the labour markets, as well as calls for improving the graduate employability agenda. It is an invaluable resource for researchers and academics, university leaders, policymakers and students who are concerned about graduate employability.

The Thinking University Expanded considers how the university can be extended and developed to an institution of play that becomes a gateway to new compositions and enactments of opportunities and happiness for university academics and students alike. A university of and in continuous play can shape the public sphere in ways that reimagine both the epistemological and political, and the metaphysical and the ethical. Without abandoning the university’s emphasis on thinking, the book examines the prospects of opening the university to ‘a new, possible use’. The singular outcomes-based lens of seeing higher education distorts the humane and ethical nuance of what a university can potentially do and aspire towards. For this reason, the book intends to find a new use for the idea of a university – one that is responsible and responsive in both its pursuit of the truth and being open to different kinds of truth, as made manifest in diverse contexts and life-worlds. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the field of higher education.

Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University investigates the impact of neoliberalism on academics in today’s universities. Considering the experiences of early career researchers as well as more experienced academics, it outlines the changing nature of working life in the university precipitated by the reality of de-professionalisation, worsening conditions of employment, and general precarious existence. The book traces the dramatic shift in the role and function of universities and academics over the last forty years. It considers how capitalist neoliberalism drives universities to operate like businesses in a cut-throat financialised education market place. Uniquely the book then provides a possible alternative in the form of the National Education Service (NES) and what this alternative system could look like. Thought-provoking and relevant, this book will be of use to postgraduate students as well as new, emerging, and established academics interested in the current state of higher education, academic life, and possibilities for the future.

This book presents a showcase of discussions and critical perspectives about Nepalese higher education. Its chapters cover topics such as the impacts of local sociopolitical changes and global forces on public and private education, emerging online and distance education, administrative and intellectual leadership, quality assessment, graduate employability, global mobility of students, and the contributions of global diaspora of Nepalese scholars. The central questions of the book are: What are some of the local and global academic interactions in Nepalese higher education and what are the current challenges and pathways for advancements and improvements? How can Nepalese higher education absorb twenty-first century values of quality education as external forces, while adapting new developments to local needs? How can scholars interested in Nepalese, South Asian, and international higher education create opportunities for scholarship and professional collaboration around research on higher education in this region of South Asia? What issues and perspectives can research and scholarship about Nepal’s higher education offer to international discourse in higher education? The book offers information and resources to international educators interested in the dynamics of Nepalese and, by implication, South Asian higher education by introducing key challenges in policy and programs, innovative changes in curricula, effective approaches in technology application, and strategies for future integration of global reforms in education.

This book is among the first of its kind to comprehensively examine the implementation of soft skills in universities in the developing country, Vietnam. The context is unique as the implementation is taking place within the distinctive socio-economic, cultural and political characteristics of the country, amidst several simultaneously-executed educational reforms. Tran lays down the foundation for discussion by providing readers with a comprehensive review of how soft skills implementation has come into existence in higher education across the globe, before diving into the implementation of soft skills in Vietnamese universities. He goes on to highlight the interesting differences in the conceptualization of soft skills between Vietnamese universities and those in the West. The book depicts and compares how university leaders and managers tackle contextual factors, submit to constraints enforced by political forces, and how they use institutional advantages available for implementation. It goes further to examine how personal and contextual factors affect teachers’ and students’ engagement with the implementation, and highlights the role of work-integrated learning and extra-curricular activities in developing soft skills for students. Finally, the book investigates the contribution of external stakeholders, such as alumni, employers, skills experts, and local authorities, to the implementation and obstacles that prevent their participation. This book will be a valuable reference for the implementation of soft skills in higher education around the world.

The Doctorate as Experience in Europe and Beyond presents a detailed and fascintating account of completing a doctorate from the perspectives of researchers, supervisors and students. It provides an in-depth insight through qualitative data, interpretative methods and insider experiences for a truly unique perspective. Given the popularity of doctoral studies and their increasing importance outside of academia, the PhD has needed to evolve and develop, particularly given its role in the internationalization of universities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with international participants, this book explores case studies and comparative analysis of the dimensions of researcher identity, the processes of supervision and the use of languages for teaching and learning and conducting research. Providing a keen insight into how the internationalization of higher education is affecting the doctoral experience, The Doctorate as Experience in Europe and Beyond is ideal reading for all academics, doctoral supervisors and examiners as well as postgraduate students involved in doctoral education.

This book walks community activists through the rationale for assuming local responsibility for academic performance, outlines steps needed to drive that change, and suggests curricular direction and school policy requirements.

Urban Change and Citizenship in Times of Crisis addresses the fact that in the beginning of the twenty-first century the majority of the world’s population is urbanised, a social fact that has turned cities more than ever into focal sites of social change. Multiple economic and political strategies, employed by a variety of individual and collective actors, on a number of scales, constitute cities as contested spaces that hold opportunities as well as restrictions for their inhabitants. While cities and urban spaces have long been of central concern for the social sciences, today, classical sociological questions about the city acquire new meaning: Can cities be spaces of emancipation, or does life in the modern city entail a corrosion of citizenship rights? Is the city the focus of societal transformation processes, or do urban environments lose importance in shaping social reality and economic relationships? Furthermore, new questions urgently need to be asked: What is the impact of different historical phenomena such as neo-liberal restructuring, financial and economic crises, or migration flows, as well as their respective counter-movements, on the structure of contemporary cities and on the citizenship rights of city inhabitants? The three volumes address such crucial questions thereby opening up new spaces of debate on both the city and new developments of urbanism. The contributions to Theories and Concepts offer new theoretical reflections on the city in a philosophical and historical perspective as well as fresh empirical analyses of social life in urban contexts. Chapters not only critically revisit classical and modern philosophical considerations about the nature of cities but no less discuss normative philosophical reflections of urban life and the role of religion in historical processes of the emergence of cities. Composed around the question whether there can be such a thing as a ‘successful city’, this volume addresses issues of urban political subjectivities by considering the city’s role in historical processes of emancipation, the fight for citizenship rights, and today’s challenges and opportunities with regard to promoting social justice, integration, and diversity. Consequentially, theory-driven empirical analyses offer new insight into ways of solving problems in urban contexts and a genuine approach to analyse the Social Quality in cities.