Pathway from vocational education and associate degree to higher education: Chinese international students in Australia

Understanding factors influencing international students' decision to engage in international education is essential for education providers to better cater for students' educational expectations and enhance their attractiveness to international students. Whilst there has been extensive research on the reasons why international students undertake cross-border higher education, international students' motivations for enrolling in vocational education and associate degree programmes are still under-researched. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 30 international students from China, this research found that pathway to higher education appears to be the most important factor motivating international students to undertake vocational education and associate degree programmes. In addition, prospect of immigration, English language proficiency, previous academic performance, agent's recommendations and relatives' and friends' advice are amongst the important factors that students take into account in their decision to choose vocational education and associate degree programmes. This research also examines why Chinese international students have chosen vocational education programmes in a dual-sector university over vocational education colleges. It found that the flexibility to articulate to higher education, international reputation of the programme, practical training and favourable location are key issues that these students draw on when making their decision to study in a dual-sector university.

'Global’ is not just ‘out there’ but also ‘right here’: expectations and experiences in internationalised and globalised higher education

This paper reports on a study that took a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional approach to investigate postgraduate student expectations and experiences in internationalised and globalised higher education. The researchers drew on Giddens’ theory of structuration1. They explored the way samples of specialist medicine trainees in the UK and pre-service teacher education students in Australia identify and make meaning of their circumstances in an era that is increasingly characterised by greater internationalisation of the student body and more globalised curricula. In this paper, we discuss some of the tensions students reported encountering, and propose several ways in which such tensions might be counteracted.

External policy influence and higher education reform in Ethiopia : understanding symbolic power of the World Bank

Increasingly national policy processes are intersected with and affected by global policy actors and ideas. In aid-recipient countries such as Ethiopia, donors use financial and non-financial means to influence national policy decisions and directions. This paper is about the non-financial influence of the World Bank (WB) in the Ethiopian higher education policy reform. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power as a ‘thinking tool’, the paper aims to shed light on forms of symbolic capital that the Bank uses to generate a ‘misrecognisable’ form of power that regulates the HE policy process in Ethiopia. The findings show that the WB transforms its symbolic capital of recognition and legitimacy to establish a ‘shared misrecognition’ and thereby make its policy prescriptions implicit and hence acceptable to local policy agents. The Bank uses knowledge-based regulatory instruments to induce compliance to its neoliberal policy prescriptions. The paper therefore underscores the value of symbol power as an analytical framework to understand elusive but critical role of donors in policy processes of aid recipient countries.

The `knowledge-intensive development' agenda and equitable access to knowledge: higher education in Ethiopia

In light of the normative assumption of the role of knowledge in economic productivity and in response to strong exogenous policy orientations (mainly from the World Bank), the government of Ethiopia has restructured and expanded the higher education (HE) subsystem since the late 1990s. In critically analysing selected policy documents, this article seeks to understand the seemingly unlinked agendas of strengthening the role of HE in supporting the knowledge-intensive development agenda and the representation of the problem of inequality in access to and success in HE. It has been shown that the economic value of knowledge has been echoed in the reforms of Ethiopia, and that the problem of inequality has been superficially represented just as inequality of access while serious challenges that hinder participation and success of women, non-traditional students and ethnically and regionally disadvantaged groups remain unchallenged. Hence, the analysis indicates that under a situation of unequal opportunity to knowledge, the knowledge-intensive development agenda appears to be empty policy rhetoric.

How are Australian higher education institutions contributing to change through innovative teaching and learning in virtual worlds?

Over the past decade, teaching and learning in virtual worlds has been at the forefront of many higher education institutions around the world. The DEHub Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) consisting of Australian and New Zealand higher education academics was formed on 2009. These educators are investigating the role that virtual worlds play in the future of education and actively changing the direction of their own teaching practice and curricula. 47 academics reporting on 28 Australian higher education institutions present an overview of how they have changed directions through the effective use of virtual worlds for diverse teaching and learning activitiessuch as business scenarios and virtual excursions, role-play simulations, experimentation and language development. The case studies offer insights into the ways in which institutions are continuing to change directions in their teaching to meet changing demands for innovative teaching, learning and research in virtual worlds. This paper highlights the ways in which the authors are using virtual worlds to creat opportunities for rich, immersive and authentic activities that would be difficult or not possible to achieve through traditional approaches

Higher education in Ethiopia : widening access and persisting inequalities

 This Chapter has argued that, even though socially and historically disadvantaged
groups (e.g., geo-politically peripheral ethnic groups and women) have been given a
nominal advantage at the entry point (by slightly lowering admission cut-off points)
and despite the fact that participation has considerably widened, social equity is far
from being a reality in Ethiopian HE. The persisting inequality in the form of high
attrition rates and low graduation rates among females and ethnic minorities, low
female participation in the fields of science and technology, prejudicial views and
hostilities against women and, overall, the subordinate position of women in HE
clearly shows that framing the problem of inequality as a mere lack of access and a
human capital disadvantage is misleading and counterproductive.