Exploring Funding in Higher Education Sector in Oman

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-20
Author(s):  
Mouza Said Al Kalbani ◽  
Ahmad Bintouq

Funding of higher education institutions is a major growing expense for the Oman government (13–14% of the total spending in 2016) and is at par with that of other governments (e.g., 11% in the UK and 15.5% in the US). However, there has been little investigation into the funding of quality higher education in Oman. The present research project aims to explore the sources of funding at Oman universities after it opened the private education sector in 1996. The research methodology includes conducting interviews with leaders in higher education to explore different types of funding (e.g., gifts, tuition fees, government support). This will enhance our understanding, as well as that of decision-makers, regarding universities' funding sources and of the higher education landscape.

1992 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-29
Author(s):  
Barry Stern

To provide an overview of the US perspective on university–industry cooperation, the author focuses on four areas: (a) the roles of governments, the higher education sector, and industry in continuing technological education; (b) cooperation between higher education and industry in developing technological education; (c) areas in which Europe, Japan, and the USA can fruitfully cooperate in continuing technological education; and (d) major challenges for the short-term future.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheryl Clark ◽  
Anna Mountford-Zimdars ◽  
Becky Francis

Rising tuition fees in England have been accompanied by a policy mandate for universities to widen participation by attracting students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This article focuses on one such group of high achieving students and their responses to rising tuition fees within the context of their participation in an outreach scheme at a research-intensive university in the UK. Our findings suggest that rather than being deterred from attending university as a result of fee increases, these young people demonstrated a detailed and fairly sophisticated understanding of higher education provision as a stratified and marketised system and justified fees within a discourse of ‘private good.’ Our analysis situates their ‘risk’ responses within the discursive tensions of the fees/widening participation mandate. We suggest that this tension highlights an intensified commodification of the relationship between higher education institutions and potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds in which widening participation agendas have shifted towards recruitment exercises. We argue that an ongoing effect of this shift has resulted in increased instrumentalism and a narrowing of choices for young people faced with the task of seeking out ‘value for money’ in their degrees whilst concurrently engaging in a number of personalised strategies aimed at compensating for social disadvantage in a system beset by structural inequalities.


First Monday ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katy Jordan

Web link mining has been previously used as a way of gaining insight into how the Internet may be replicating or reshaping connections between institutions within the higher education sector. Institutions are increasingly active on social media platforms, and these connections have not been studied. This paper presents an exploratory analysis of the network of UK higher education institutional accounts on Twitter. All U.K. institutions have a presence. Standing in recent university rankings is found to be a significant predictor of several network metrics. In examining the communities present within the network, a combination of ranking and geolocation play a role. Analysis of a sample of tweets which mention more than one U.K. higher education institution provides an indication of why the topics of tweets would reinforce prestige and location in the network structure.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 731-753
Author(s):  
Alan Apperley

Several authors have identified a ’therapeutic turn’ in education in the UK, at all levels of the system. In this paper I focus on and develop this claim, specifically in relation to the Higher Education sector. I seek to do two things: First, I argue that the ‘self’ which is identified by commentators on the therapeutic turn needs to be reworked in the direction of McGee’s idea of the ’belabored’ self. This is because the therapeutic turn serves, I argue, a set of wider economic goals arising from the restructuring of capitalism which followed in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973 and the subsequent breakdown of the post-war (1939-1945) consensus around the purpose of public policy, of which education is an important part. Second, I revisit an important document in the history of the UK Higher Education sector: the National Committee of Inquiry Into Higher Education’s 1997 report Higher Education In The Learning Society (known popularly as the Dearing Report, after its chair, Sir Ron Dearing). I argue that that the committee’s ambition to bring about a learning society characterised by lifelong learning played an important and neglected part in bringing about the therapeutic turn in higher education in the UK. The project of creating a learning society characterised by lifelong learning, advocated by the Dearing Report, should properly be recognised as an exhortation to embark upon a lifetime of labouring upon the self.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-472
Author(s):  
Kashmir Kaur

In the current landscape of higher education in the UK, international students play a key role. It is an environment in which they not only cross borders physically but also transition through various identities as they develop their professional and linguistic confidence and skills to fully access and contribute to their programme of study and beyond. The aim of this paper is to outline the results of an empirical investigation into Chinese students’ perceptions of their study experiences in the context of student mobility and English-medium instruction in higher education. It reports on a study of two groups of Chinese students – one group studying in an English-speaking environment, the other in their home country where instruction is delivered through the medium of English. Semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted at each site which focused on the transition of “crossing borders” for educational purposes. The data was analysed using thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2016). The main finding was that both groups experienced remarkably similar learning issues, despite being located in very different learning environments and crossing different types of borders.


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