Australia’s Crisis Responses During COVID-19

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global international education sector has been fraught with multiple, intensifying stressors, which have severely affected international students’ lives and study. Host government policies on international education can make a critical difference for this vulnerable population during the pandemic. Australia’s crisis response policies during the pandemic have been closely tracked and vigorously discussed amongst Chinese international students. This study examines how Australia’s crisis responses addressed the needs of international students during the pandemic, and how these policies impacted Chinese international students’ experiences and perceptions of studying in Australia. We collected qualitative data through interviews with Chinese international students, parents and migration agents, virtual ethnography on WeChat, and analysis of Australia’s policy responses. Our thematic analysis highlights participants’ experiences and views of Australia’s crisis responses in the four areas of financing, third-country transit, visas and immigration, and pandemic management. We discuss these findings in relation to the historical context of Australia’s higher education funding reforms during the 1980s and 1990s.

Financing higher education in Ukraine in the 21st century: challenges and prospects for overcoming them

The development of higher education is characterized by new priorities, which necessitates the adjustment of higher education funding mechanisms in response to new challenges. The purpose of this article is to identify these key challenges in Ukraine and justify the possibilities to face them. The analysis of funding of higher education was conducted based on macroeconomic indicators for 2005 to 2020. It is also reviewed that financing of higher education in Ukraine is characterized by decentralization and diversification, which are characterized by an increase in the share of local budgets in the structure of higher education funding in Ukraine and the use of extra-budgetary sources of funding, in the form of tuition fees. The analysis has revealed the following key challenges of financing higher education: massification of higher education, which is characterized by the triad of "high availability - low price - low quality"; change in approaches to educational activities and decrease in the number of students as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; inefficient model of financing higher education, which results in producing specialists with higher education that do not meet the needs and demands of the labor market. Overcoming the identified challenges can be achieved through reforming higher education models by aligning the structure, scope and quality of training with the needs of the economy and labour market, and its financing, through changing the cost-based approach to financing by results. This, in turn, would help align budget funding with institutional efficiency and curriculum effectiveness, and reduce the number of unclaimed specialists with higher education.

Crowdfunding in higher education: evidence from UK Universities

In contemporary higher education systems, funding is increasingly associated with performativity, assessment, and competition, and universities are seeking different forms of financing their activities. One of these new forms is crowdfunding, a tool enabled by the digitalization of finance. Based on data from the UK higher education system and two crowdfunding platforms, our study adds to previous crowdfunding research in academic settings that have, thus far, focused on research projects, and assesses who is participating, their level of engagement and the resources they have gathered from crowdfunding. Our findings show that crowdfunding is used more by universities that have fewer resources. These universities are more teaching-oriented, less prestigious, and have a student body largely derived from lower socio-economic sectors of society. The popularity of crowdfunding in this type of university suggests that crowdfunding may enhance the democratization of higher education funding. However, as optimal crowdfunding participation and engagement requires high academic-to-student ratios and total-staff-to-academic-staff ratios, universities facing a greater financial precarity may be disadvantaged in their access to and engagement with crowdfunding. Differentials between part-time and full-time student ratios may exacerbate this disadvantage. Our study suggests that crowdfunding is a viable means of obtaining additional financing for learning activities complementing the fundings from other sources, but raises concerns about the use of crowdfunding as a burden to academics and students to find resources to meet learning experiences that ought to be provided by universities in the first place.

Unprofessional

This article analyzes the case of Avital Ronell, Amy Hungerford's response to striking Yale graduate students, and higher education funding to argue that such instances illustrate the precise features of rampant professionalization—its pressures, demands, and imperatives—in the midst of the radical transformation of the material conditions that first produced its practices. Despite the increasingly limited ability for faculty to determine how their fields intersect with and are conditioned by forces beyond the confines of their carefully delimited communities, particularly those of the capitalist market economy, collectively the professoriate acts otherwise. As a whole, faculty continue to churn out academic progeny through a long period of apprentissage for positions that, taken in aggregate, no longer exist. Intensified discourses and anxieties around professionalization emerge to fill this gap, both registering the latent crisis and suggesting a means for its overcoming. Building on these examples, the authors suggest that professionalization remains a tactic through which academic laborers self-discipline but that today such self-disciplining tends to operate through the contradictory entwinement of (worker) reproduction and (institutional) reputation. The article closes with a new figure: that of the “unprofessional,” suggesting that our task is to shift the expectations set by professionalization that our own reproduction can only be ensured through its congealment in the commodity of reputation.

Does Student Loan Debt Structure Young People’s Housing Tenure? Evidence from England

This article analyses the interaction between two policy areas affecting young people in England – housing and student funding. It is the first of its kind exploring a range of dynamics in the relationship between housing and student loan debt. Young people today are far less likely to own their home and are more likely to live with their parents than earlier generations. In parallel, higher education tuition fee increases have led to a growing share of students taking out loans and graduating with higher debt, which they will be repaying for most of their working lives. This research examines the relationship between student loans – having borrowed for higher education and attitudes towards debt – and housing tenure at age 25, using the Next Steps dataset. We find that young graduates who did not borrow for higher education are more likely to own their home and less likely to rent or live with their parents than graduates who borrowed for their studies or young people who never attended higher education. These results suggest that higher education funding policies and student loan debt play important roles in structuring young people’s housing in England.

Who can earn risk-free profit? : Possibility of Arbitrage in the Hungarian Student Loan System

People without tertiary educational attainment are more affected by poverty. Thus, obtaining a higher degree of education can act as a key to pulling sections of society out of the poverty trap. In higher education, Hungary has a dual-track tuition policy, which offers restricted merit-based entry to state-funded universities, leading to entirely free higher education for a limited number of students. As the most disadvantaged students perform worse at secondary school, their chances of being enrolled in free tertiary education are much lower. To improve equity, students have access to a well-designed student loan system in Hungary. This study demonstrates that Hungary’s higher education funding policy is currently further widening the gap between the rich and the poor, as holding a Student Loan 1 and a Hungarian Government Security Plus (MÁP Plusz) position results in arbitrage for those who do not need to borrow to finance their tuition fee and living expenses during the academic years. Instead of supporting the catchingup process for students coming from low-income backgrounds, the Hungarian system provides additional financial aid to advantaged students. Based on an international comparison of student loan schemes, adopting a targeted approach instead of a universal one might be worthy of consideration, e.g. providing an interest rate subsidy to disadvantaged students or setting a lower income level of the student’s household as an eligibility criterion for borrowing.

Can We Buy Virtue? Implications from State University Funding On Musical Instrument Performance Teacher Mandate

Recent world developments have put a strain on the humanities in general, and higher education music performance study degree-programmes in particular. In an educational system currently promoting consumer-product relationships where the music performance teacher is very much accountable for the students’ development into professional musicians and, recently, also sustainable world citizens, we must give more attention to what, whom and why we educate? This chapter is an armchair analytical philosophical continuation of a paper published elsewhere (Rolfhamre, 2020). Taking the lead from Julia Annas’ (2011) virtue-as-skill, I will, here, elaborate on what implications the Norwegian state higher education funding system may have on the higher education music performance teacher’s perceived mandate from the perspectives of music pedagogy, rhetoric and virtue ethics. First, I pursue three different usages of the verb “to buy” to exemplify why I find the chapter’s title to be relevant and valid. This sets the premises for the following turn to rhetoric to highlight the starting point’s persuasive functions and incentives. Subsequently, I briefly relate the argument to Butlerian performativity to emphasise its relation to normativity, inclusion-exclusion and the theoretical possibility of “breaking free”. From this position, I draw on Aristotelian phronesis, mainly through the position held by Hansen (2007) to sketch up an ecology in which I ask how this all affects the teacher’s mandate?

Paradise Found?

This chapter conceptualizes a process for cryptocurrency to diversify traditional methods of higher education funding in the United States. Cryptocurrency funding augments traditional revenue streams and shifts the discussion of education costs from expenses to a more robust conversation about innovative avenues to wealth generation as a potential solution to fund the mission of American higher education. This chapter acknowledges the central concerns of higher education funding as it explores these arguments as legacy discourses rooted in career preparation, accessibility and affordability, and arguments about the need for a broad-based education vs. more technical skills training. Further, an alternative model to current higher education funding models is presented, and if deployed, this asset class could help to serve education needs by funding research, students, and the academy through an illustrated conceptual framework for funding.