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School choice in China is characterised by the payment of substantial amounts of additional ('choice') fees by parents to the preferred school, and by the use of cultural, social and economic capital to obtain places in oversubscribed schools. This study examines the role of social capital in current parent-initiated school choice in China. It finds that it is common for parents to mobilise their social capital in the form of guanxi to acquire insider information, to facilitate or gain exceptional entry into the preferred school and to reduce or waive the choice fee. The paper also addresses the issue of educational inequality caused by such practice in the school choice process. [Author abstract]

Study at a foreign university can be an important way of developing international human capital. We investigate factors affecting international student flows for higher education and their consequences for bilateral market integration in Australia. Estimation results demonstrate that income, cost competitiveness, migration network effects and other education pathways increase the demand for tertiary education. Our results show that university study, inter alia, is an important determinant of bilateral trade between Australia and the student's home country. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

This paper outlines the findings of a study employing a partial least squares (PLS) structural equation methodology to test a customer satisfaction model of the drivers of student satisfaction and loyalty in higher education settings. Drawing upon a moderately large sample of students enrolled in four `types' of Australian universities, the findings suggest that student loyalty is predicted by student satisfaction, which is in turn predicted by the perceived image of the host university. While the perceived quality of \"humanware\" (e.g., people and process) and \"hardware\" (e.g., infrastructure and tangible service elements) has an impact on perceived value, this was found to be weak and indeterminate. Of most importance was the impact of the institution's institutional image, which strongly predicted perceived value, and to a lesser extent student satisfaction. The findings have implications for newer, less prestigious universities seeking to compete in a more deregulated, market driven environment. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

This paper offers an overarching analytical heuristic that takes us beyond current research, anchored in conceptions of national states, markets, and systems of higher education institutions. We seek to shape comparative higher education research with regard to globalization in much the same way that Clark's (1983) \"triangle\" heuristic has framed comparative higher education research in the study of national policies and higher education systems. Our \"glonacal agency heuristic\" points to three intersecting planes of existence, emphasizing the simultaneous significance of global, national, and local dimensions and forces. It combines the meaning of \"agency\" as an established organization with its meaning as individual or collective action. Our paper critiques the prevailing framework in cross-national higher education research, addressing the liberal theory that underpins this framework, the ways scholars address the rise of neo-liberal policies internationally, conceptual shortcomings of this work, and emergent discourse about \"academic capitalism\". We then discuss globalization and our heuristic. Finally, we provide examples of how states, markets, and institutions can be reconceptualized in terms of global, national, regional, and local agencies and agency.

Our common understandings of the public/private distinction in higher education are drawn from neo-classical economics and/or statist political philosophy. However, the development of competition and markets at the national level, and the new potentials for private and public goods created by globalisation in higher education, have exposed weaknesses in the traditional notions of public/private. For example, (1) the statist notion that higher education is always/already a public good blinds us to its role in producing scarce positional private goods, even in free systems; (2) because there is no global state, both statists and neo-liberals model the global higher education environment simply as a trading environment without grasping the potential for global public goods in education - goods that are subject to non-rivalry or non-excludability, and broadly available across populations, on a global scale. Yet higher education in one nation has the potential to create positive and negative externalities in another; and all higher education systems and institutions can benefit from collective systems e.g. that facilitate cross-border recognition and mobility. The paper sets out to revise public/private in higher education. Rather than defining public/private in terms of legal ownership, it focuses on the social character of the goods. It argues that public/private goods are not always zero sum and under certain conditions provide conditions of possibility for each other. It proposes (a) units in national government that focus specifically on cross-border effects; (b) global policy spaces - taking in state agencies, individual universities, NGOs and commercial agents - to consider the augmentation, distribution of and payment for global public goods. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

Numerous studies have investigated economies of scale and scope in higher education as a means of providing public and private providers of college and university teaching, research and other services and their stakeholders with knowledge of the cost structures that underpin provision in this economically and socially important sector. However, debate continues on the precise nature of the economies of scale and scope in higher education given the mixed findings, largely because of significant institutional and other differences across studies. To address this, we employ meta-regression analysis to explore not only the overall level of scale and scope economies across more than 40 international studies conducted in Australia, the US, the UK, Italy, China, and elsewhere since the early 1980s, but also those factors that potentially affect their presence in the higher education sector. Our findings suggest that functional form and allowances for managerial efficiency have a significant impact on the estimated scale economies. In contrast, for scope economies, the key discriminating factors appear to be when the analysis was conducted, the diversity of the sample, and the national level of economic development.

This collection of short essays presents and examines six vignettes of organisational change in British, New Zealand and European universities. Drawing on the social studies of economisation literature, formal research projects and auto-ethnographic insights, the authors detail profound changes in how knowledge is produced in universities. They examine policy documents, calculative techniques and management practices to illustrate how proliferating market rationalities, technologies and relations are reimagining university missions, reframing their practices and refashioning their subjects. Their vignettes demonstrate that market-making pressures are emerging from micro-scale socio- technical arrangements as well as altered funding models and external policy imperatives. They reveal the extent and detail of market-making pressures on academic practice in research and teaching. Finding ways to contest these pressures is imperative. [Author abstract]

In the past few decades, the additional revenues available via higher education exports (through both relatively higher prices and increased enrolments) have attracted the attention of providers in many developed countries, not least in Anglophone countries like the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia. However, while the revenue case is strong, the institutional cost structures underlying the provision of higher education services for international students remain relatively unknown at the sector level. Accordingly, we offer a comprehensive analysis of the cost economies underlying higher education provision for international students using a sample of 37 Australian public universities over the period from 2003 to 2012. The findings suggest that it is appealing to enrol additional overseas students given their lower average and marginal costs and the significant economies of scale prevailing in higher education generally. Further, while we find evidence of economies of scope for overseas students only in smaller institutions, there is no evidence of diseconomies of scope, implying the current number of overseas students and their joint production with domestic students at the least does not lead to unnecessarily higher overall costs.

Schools and school education systems within nations are vying to increase international student enrolments in secondary schools. This analysis of the change over a decade in the enrolment of international secondary students in Victoria, Australia, indicates how the processes of internationalisation and commercialisation of education have affected both public and private school sectors. Four factors have impacted on international senior student enrolments over a decade: global economic fluctuations; the growth of international schools globally targeting home country students; the emergence of overseas campuses for elite private schools and policies encouraging internationalisation. We propose that these forces, among others, are working in concert to reshape the nature of international student populations and international schooling in both home and host countries. These factors, together with an overarching instrumentalist policy approach underpinning the engagement of Australian schools with the international education market, provide new opportunities for less socio-economically advantaged schools to enter the international education market. It argues that the common idea of international students attending only elite schools no longer captures the phenomenon and raises questions as to how we understand what it means to be an 'international' school or student. [Author abstract]

In western nations, the social and economic changes of the past 30 years have facilitated a reorientation of the focus of educational institutions. Global capitalism has placed education at the forefront of national competitiveness, and governments have responded with education policies primarily designed to serve the needs of the market. Such neo-liberal economic imperatives have been supported by a variety of neoconservative social forces calling for schools to become sites of cultural and moral restoration. This paper draws upon current theoretical debates about the consequences of such changes and employs ethnographic data from a small qualitative study of Australian youth to argue the case for a more democratic and student-centred approach to educational reform. It contends that in the interests of all young people, it is time for schools to resist systemic impulses to make them producers of human capital and claim their role as transformative institutions of human possibility.