Higher Education Management and Policy

Higher Education Management and Policy, Volume 22 Issue 3 includes articles on project economy approaches, multidimensional ranking, the global impact of the financial crisis, sustaining leadership, government funding as leverage for quality teaching, and skills and offshoring.
Previously published as Higher Education Management, Higher Education Management and Policy (HEMP) is published three times each year and is edited by the OECD’s Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education. It covers the field through articles and reports on such issues as quality assurance, human resources, funding, and internationalisation. It also is a source of information on activities and events organised by OECD’s IMHE Programme.
John Craig, Andrew Gunn, Higher skills and the knowledge economy: the challenge of offshoring. Recent economics literature on offshoring highlights the trend towards the relocation of high-skill jobs to emerging economies. This evolution presents a challenge to the established knowledge economy discourse on which the relationship between higher education, higher skills, higher productivity and higher incomes has been based. This paper identifies some tentative impacts of offshoring for employment and education patterns in OECD countries and argues that the assumptions of the knowledge economy discourse need to be revised. The implications for higher education institutions are considered and three potential strategic responses are presented.
Sabiha Y. Essack, Indirani Naidoo, Glen Barnes, Government funding as leverage for quality teaching and learning: a south african perspective. The South African Higher Education Funding Framework uses funding as a lever to achieve equitable student access, quality teaching and research, and improved student retention and success. Maximising a university subsidy from the national Department of Education necessitates innovative strategies at the pre- and post-student admission stages. This paper describes how the resource base of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal was increased by the Academic Development and Student Support project which enabled the Faculty to meet enrolment targets and increase graduation rates.
Robin Middlehurst, Sustaining leadership in challenging times. Some governments hit by recession have chosen to invest in higher education as part of long-term economic and social development and international competitiveness agendas; others have opted for a route of cuts, financial stringency and contraction of their higher education systems. This article explores challenges to leadership in the latter context. Different types of institutional responses are examined in terms of three categories: reactive, adaptive and generative, first in terms of the nature of responses and second in relation to three institutional case studies. The higher education responses are then compared with the responses – and associated leadership lessons – that have been compiled from other sectors. Different forms of leadership development are also helping leaders to meet the challenges at individual, team and organisational levels, within and across countries and sectors.
Heather Eggins, Peter West, The global impact of the financial crisis. The impact of the financial crisis on higher education has been considerable, and its effects are continuing. These effects can be discerned in a number of ways; but whereas both developed and developing countries are affected, they can be affected differently. A modifying factor is the shape and structure of the higher education system within each country. This paper looks at developed and developing countries and considers key areas of higher education affected by the financial crisis and possible ways forward.
Frans van Vught, Don F. Westerheijden, Multidimensional ranking. This paper sets out to analyse the need for better "transparency tools" which inform university stakeholders about the quality of universities. First, we give an overview of what we understand by the concept of transparency tools and those that are currently available. We then critique current transparency tools’ methodologies, looking in detail at the question of data sources, the risks involved in constructing league tables and the challenges in using composite indicators. Lastly, we argue in favour of developing a new principle for transparency tools: that of multidimensional ranking.
Ingo Rollwagen, Project economy approaches for higher education.