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In its pursuit of global university rankings, Indonesia introduced a series of higher education policies, one in 2014 to grant autonomy to a select group of universities, and another in 2017 to tie financial and promotional incentives to scientific publications for all researchers. To examine scientific productivity surrounding these policies, we use bibliometric data from Scopus spanning three decades from 1990 to 2020. We investigate the patterns of publication and collaboration and analyze them across journal quartiles, academic fields, and researcher cohorts. Our findings reveal that publications increased dramatically for both autonomous and non-autonomous higher education institutions after 2014. Single-university authorship was common practice and skewed publication quality towards Q3 and Q4 journals, while co-authorships with foreign organizations pulled the shift towards Q1 journals consistently across all fields. New researchers starting in 2014 published fewer Q1 and more Q3 and Q4 publications than the earlier cohort. We highlight policy implications on the need for a balance between publication quantity and quality and call on Indonesian policymakers to introduce holistic higher education reforms rather than introducing reforms that focus on the performance of the university for ranking purposes.

In this study, we use village-level data to examine the impact of geographic proximity on inequality in higher education. We define higher education oases as the area collectively constructed by all the universities within a 15-km travel distance radius from research-intensive universities. Based on the coarsened exact matching method, we identified villages with comparable socioeconomic statistics that differed only in terms of their proximity to highly concentrated higher education resources, thus mimicking a treatment and a control group. Evidence based on this quasi-experimental design shows that villages located in higher education oases have a significantly higher percentage of residents aged 25–34 who have earned a master’s degree or above compared to those not located in higher education oases. However, there is no significant difference in the percentage of residents aged 20–24 with a bachelor’s degree or above between the two groups of villages. This study sheds light on the impact of the geography of opportunity on inequality in higher education in Taiwan.

This study investigated the growth trajectory of academic achievement in Math and English among 519 students in a vocational senior high school in Taiwan. Covering the complete individual learning profile, our dataset included pre-enrollment variables, periodic test scores, and college entrance examination scores. We employed a group-based trajectory model that identified three homogenous subgroups with distinct trajectories of academic achievement in Math and English and demonstrated baseline predictive factors associated with these trajectories as well as relationships between different trajectories and students’ college entrance examination scores. Our analysis contributes to the literature in two ways. First, this study demonstrates that when school practices focus on improving or remediating the performance of students in the low-achievement group, the obvious decrease in performance of those in the middle is ignored. Such finding indicates the need for inclusive or specialized practices that enhance the performance of students in all groups. Second, our analysis reveals that pre-enrollment academic preparation appears to be a strong predictor of later academic performance as noted through the reproduction of pre-enrollment academic performance in students’ college entrance examination scores. Therefore, upon enrollment, schools should start interventions that reflect the needs of different groups of students.