Explore the vast range of titles available.

Although internationalisation of the scientific world is a key issue in public attention and policy, the actual information base on migration and mobility of ‘teachers in higher education’, ‘scholars’, ‘academics’ or ‘researchers’ has remained weak. Most available statistics focus on ‘foreign’ students or ‘foreign’ scholars rather than persons mobile for purposes of learning and academic/research work, and provide information only on a single moment rather than on the life course of moving between countries. In recent years, some surveys of the ‘academic profession’ and ‘researchers’ have been undertaken primarily in economically advanced countries or especially in European countries that provide an overview on various modes, e.g. migration prior study, short-term student mobility and mobility for the whole degree programme, mobility in the phase of doctoral education and training, professional mobility in various stages of the professional career and finally shorter visits linked to academic and research work. All available information suggests that substantial differences exist by country and that no signs of convergence are visible. Moreover, surveys confirm that international experience is a frequently valuable asset of academic research careers but often is viewed as less beneficial than conventional wisdom suggests.

Diversity and excellence in higher education seem to be conflicting concepts. Nevertheless, they are dynamic and closely intertwined - indeed they may even require each other. The book brings together insights from ten different countries to analyse these multi-facetted phenomena and discuss how they may be reconciled. To set the overall context, it critically addresses markets and managerialism, whilst foregrounding the dangers of certain behavior that European countries are currently, though often unwisely, copying from the U.S. In a mass higher education system, the social basis of the student body diversifies - a fact that creates new challenges for planners and managers. The authors' study of diversity concentrates particularly upon issues of equity and justice for students, addressing their life cycle transitions from school to higher education, degree completion, postgraduate education and employability. It also considers challenges posed by diversification at the institutional level, encompassing changes in management, leadership, governance and performance assessment. It addresses attempts to achieve excellence by selectivity, thereby contributing to the stratification of university systems; and it explores attempts to achieve excellence by merging smaller institutions to form larger entities. The book's overall conclusion is that diversity and excellence are not necessarily enemies but relatives who cannot escape the bond between them.

Higher education had a predominant national and institutional focus for a long time. In Europe, supra-national political activities played a major role for increasing the interest in comparative research. Comparative perspectives are important in order to deconstruct the often national perspective of causal reasoning, for proving benchmarks, for theory-testing, for opening up the horizon for potential reforms, and for the analysis of the growing internationality of higher education. However, many practical factors make comparative research on higher education vulnerable: decentralized funding, coincidental compositions of participating countries, difficulties of reaching a conceptual and methodological consensus in multicountry research teams. Often, comparative research projects take quite a long time, before the major findings are published eventually. Moreover, often data are presented across countries without sufficient explanations of the respective context. Comparative research on higher education, thus, often does not fulfil the initial hopes, but obviously is such an important approach that efforts are indispensible to cope with the challenging conditions.

\"Internationalisation\", the growing border-crossing activities between national systems of higher education is losing ground to \"globalisation\", increasing border-crossing activities of blurred national systems which is often employed to depict world-wide trends and growing global competition. This article addresses recent issues of knowledge transfer. It points out tensions between increasing diversity in higher education and efforts to facilitate recognition of prior studies on student mobility. It shows the diversity of steering and management policies with respect to internationalisation and globalisation. Finally, it asks whether globalisation of higher education has to be viewed as a manifestation of \"turbo-capitalism\" or could be viewed instead as a move towards \"global understanding\". (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

Higher education has been one of the major thematic areas of the European Journal of Education over the years, and the relationships between higher education the world of work have been one of the 10 major themes in this area. The multitude of related articles shows substantial changes of the situation and the related discourse. The employment and work situation of graduates underwent changes in the course of expansion, the respective political climate had its ups and downs, and the knowledge base on the impact of study conditions and provisions of graduate employment and work improved over time. This notwithstanding, we note a constant return to the persistent questions as to whether we have too few or too many graduates. In recent years, higher education has been increasingly exposed to greater instrumental expectations. The paradigms of ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ reinforce a call for higher education to serve more directly the ‘employability’ of graduates. As views vary strikingly regarding issues such as specialisation vs. general competences, preparation for predictable tasks vs. preparing for an unexpected future, etc., higher education could keep a diversity of options in the best ways to ensure professional relevance.

Debates and policies in Europe as regards the diversity of higher education institutions and programmes have changed substantially over the years. When expansion of the rate of new entry students was expected to grow beyond 10%, diversification between types of higher education institutions became the most popular option, whereas no consensus emerged as far as the extent of diversity and the most desirable classifications are concerned. In the 1980s, attention shifted gradually towards \"vertical\" differences among institutions of formally the same type. Since the 1990s, more extreme modes of vertical diversity were more frequently advocated as options to embark into world-wide competition for \"world-class university\". The concurrent popular debates are criticized as blaming moderate vertical inter-institutional diversity, emphasis on intra-institutional diversity, efforts to put prime emphasis on a variety of profiles of any model other than extreme vertical diversity as counteracting \"quality\", although evidence for the superiority of the model praised is feeble. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

Though the book is a contribution to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER), it is not just about the history of the organisation as such. The contributions provide an account of the emergence of higher education as a field of study and research in Europe, its institutionalisation, and its relationships to higher education policy and practice.

Research on higher education is an object-focussed area based on a broad range of disciplines. The institutional base is often shaky and diverse. Various characteristics, notably the blurred distinction between the scholar and the reflective practitioner, contribute to considerable tensions, though research on higher education enjoys substantial public attention. Interest in comparative research on higher education grew in recent years and was reinforced by the community of higher education researchers in Europe. As it can be conceptually and methodologically demanding and fruitful, the growing interest could serve as a stimulus for enhancing a common identity and a growing quality. However few comparative research designs represent the ideal type of setting a research agenda of clearly defined hypotheses to be tested, and if they do so, the study mostly turns out to be too simplistic due to disregard of the complex context. Rather, most comparative projects are exploratory and most productive in providing unexpected insight. In addition, comparative research faces many problems of a practical nature. Costly research seems to be granted sufficient funds only if it addresses issues of current political concern. Language barriers and limits of field knowledge often lead to a poor provision of information. International collaborative research teams tend to be vulnerable due to, among others, a heterogeneity of schools of thoughts, spiralling costa and different work styles. The author argues that comparative studies on higher education are most fruitful in destroying conceptual reasoning based on narrow experience - they are a gold mine for the early stages of conceptual restructuring. They are indispensible for understanding a reality shaped by common international trends, reforms based on comparative observation, growing trans-national activities and partial supra-national integration in higher education. Comparative projects can be regarded as theoretically and methodologically most promising if they are based on a semi-structured research design, whereby the strengths of various conceptual approaches in explaining the phenomena are analysed and the researchers systematically deal with the fact that the project is likely to generate surprising information requiring to restructure the initial conceptual framework. Inhaltliche Schwerpunkte: Introduction - Research on higher education (Higher education as an object-focussed area of research - A close link to problem-solving - The blurred distinction between practitioners and researchers - The systematic incompleteness of higher education research - The shaky balance of communication with the actors concerned - The thematic pattern of higher education research) - The comparative dimension of higher education research (Growing involvement in comparative research - Methodological issues - Practical issues of comparative higher education research) - Select research experiences (Reference to personal experience - Implementation of higher education reforms in Europe - Evaluation of study abroad - The ERASMUS evaluation research project - The academic profession - Relationships between education and employment in Japan in comparative perspective - A summary of research experiences) - Implications for further research. (HOF/Abstract übernommen).