Researching tertiary education ecosystems

Researching tertiary education ecosystems

Current social, economic and political transformations mean that radical thinking is required about how post-secondary education is structured, governed, funded, and delivered (Hazelkorn 2023). This is driving many countries to reframe their policy discussions around tertiary education as a coherent system, rather than separating higher education from other forms of postsecondary education. What does this mean for research that seeks to investigate the connections and relationships, the complementarities and conflicts between these sectors? What research is needed to provide an evidence base for policymakers, funders, institutions and educationalists seeking to pursue this rethinking of postsecondary education? How should we evaluate current attempts to reformulate tertiary education and the lessons they may yield for future efforts?

One way of framing this would be to develop the concept of tertiary ecosystems made up of subsystems that are – to a greater or lesser degree – coherent, collaborative, co-ordinated and co-produced. This would embrace the entire post-secondary landscape as one in which different types of education, training, and research and innovation actors interact with each other in formal, informal, and non-formal arrangements which are, to a greater or lesser extent, mutually and societally beneficial and interdependent. Such ecosystems are dynamic spaces in which the number, type, role, and responsibilities of participants, individually and collectively, evolve and modify over time in response to the changing environment.

This concept might encourage the exploration of the interconnections and interdependencies – as well as the disconnects and dysfunctionalities – of particular tertiary education ecosystems as they have developed over time. It can help to understand planned systems, such as the Californian hierarchy of elite research universities, mid-ranking universities and open community colleges, and binary systems, where two distinct university and non-university sectors have developed largely independently of each other. Equally, it can help to comprehend more diverse and differentiated arrangements especially if their various elements have been allowed to evolve in ad hoc and even haphazard ways. It can also help to explore the articulation of specific tertiary education systems with other domains, in particular, secondary education and relevant employment sectors and labour markets.

Such rethinking could help to counter the ghettoisation of postsecondary education research, which has tended to emphasise the differences between sectors, focusing on the borderlines, boundary-making, tiers and barriers between them. It might also challenge the supremacy of higher education, universities and research institutions over vocational, technical and further education sectors, and the different value that is ascribed to research into these subsystems. This requires us to rethink traditional and dominant understandings of knowledge and skills formation, and the role of, and contributions to, research and innovation, which tend to be ascribed to particular types of institutions and hierarchical tiers (UNESCO-UNEVOC n.d.; Cedefop 2014).

From the perspective of access and student success, some national tertiary ecosystems would be seen as more or less successful at enabling wider participation, while others would be considered hierarchical, with inequalities ‘baked in’ and difficult to shift. Changes in the ways in which post-secondary systems and institutions are responding (and need to respond) to the growing diversity of the learner cohort – in the light of societal, demographic and economic changes – requires more vigorous investigation. Comparisons of the funding, resources and value apportioned to each of the subsystems might further reveal inequalities that, over time, have served to legitimise these hierarchies. The differences in resources, modes of operation and governance and forms of policymaking within systems need to be explored, together with how the boundaries within such systems are shifting and blurring, especially in relation to labour markets, technologies, ways of working, and social movements (Damme 2023).

In the process of adopting a tertiary lens, care needs to be taken that we are not simply engaged in ‘tertiary-washing’ – in other words, calling something tertiary when it is really about university-level education. This especially concerns the data we are using. We know much more about higher education because it is clearly delineated by easily recognisable qualifications (Bachelors, Masters, Doctorate). The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) identifies ‘tertiary’ as encompassing everything from short-cycle level 5 to doctoral or equivalent level 8 (UNESCO UIS 2011). However, depending on the context, post-secondary education can include technical/vocational education and training/further education and training (TVET/FET), polytechnics/UaS, university colleges and (research) universities as well as adult and community education, foundation (literacy and numeracy), second-chance education, skills development and apprenticeships, and continuing education and Lifelong Learning. It may seem strange to include literacy/numeracy and community education, for example, but who else provides for mature learners? This is a huge agenda, and different types of credentials and descriptors, often with little recognition beyond their country, makes it hard to track and compare. This area is wide open for deeper study and policy consideration, especially how different governments and policymakers are responding to it.

Many ideas, concepts and literatures could inform this rethinking of tertiary education ecosystems and our research into them. We offer five in particular:

• The civic engagement of all tertiary education institutions and actors within an ecosystem, the co-production of knowledge and the collaborative development of solutions to social, economic and environmental problems.

• How research and innovation is achieved through collaborative partnerships, regional clusters and global networks, especially in the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

• The geography of place and the importance – or otherwise – of tertiary education ecosystems in placemaking.

• The role of governance and whether it underpins or undermines strategic vision and sustainable arrangements to ensure coherence, collaboration and coordination between different actors each of whom have their own internal logics and ambitions.

• The concept of biodiversity, related to ecosystems, which describes the rich variation of life forms wherein each species plays a critical role, mutually supporting each other, without which the entire system may collapse.

There are many other organising ideas which could animate research into tertiary education ecosystems, and we look forward to reading about them in the pages of this and other journals.

CiteScore for Policy Reviews in Higher Education

Policy Reviews in Higher Education has received its first CiteScore from Scopus since its launch in 2017. Its score of 6.0 places it firmly in the first quartile (actually within the top 10%) of journals in education and education research and 138th out of 1469 titles in 2022, the latest ranking. CiteScore 2022 is a measure of the number of citations made between 2019 and 2022 of articles published in the journal during that period, divided by the number of articles published in the journal in those years (233 citations of 39 articles).

You would expect the editors to be sceptical of such metrics and rankings. Citations can be critical as well as positive, but this measure does not distinguish between these types of reference. In a version of the Matthew Effect, well-known and widely-published authors will tend to attract more citations than lesser known authors at the beginning of their publishing careers. As most readers of academic articles will know, citations are often used to reinforce the author’s own argument or finding, rather than to recognise a substantive and original contribution to knowledge by the cited article. As many authors who have been cited will know, citations do not always refer to the key, original or central ideas, findings or conclusions contained in their publication. They may mention a secondary or marginal point that other authors have made before. Fundamentally, the whole idea of placing a quantitative measure on a largely qualitative judgement of the value of an article or journal is also questionable.

However, we are also realists, and we hope that a Q1 ranking will attract high quality review proposals and articles from academics and scholarly practitioners who wish to publish in journals such as Policy Reviews, for the benefit of you, the reader. And we are pleased at the recognition – albeit flawed – of the significance of this journal so soon after its establishment. This signals recognition of the need for research to reflect more rigorously on the impact and implications of its findings for, and on, policy.

This issue

In this issue, Natalia Veles, Carroll Graham and Claire Ovaska offer a systematic review of literature on university professional staff roles, identities, and interaction. They found changes in professional identity construction, a growing sense of agency among professional staff, increasing visibility in their contributions to university work and developing collaborations with academic staff. They set these findings in the context of critical engagement with the discourse of ‘third space’ and other boundary zones of staff interaction and working together. Their review concludes with specific propositions for university practice, informed policymaking and future research.

In their article, Francis Ansah, Patrick Swanzy and Patrício Langa use a quadruple helix framework to map the higher education policymaking ecosystem in Ghana. This includes the four key actors of government, academia, industry/business and civil society, and the interactions and relationships between them. Their research suggests that higher education public policymaking in Ghana does not involve these key actors equitably, nor does it create a sufficient coalition among them for successful policy implementation. In addition, the minimal use of research evidence appears to be a major hindrance to progressive and transformative policymaking in Ghana.

Gabriela Cagliesi and Denise Hawkes investigate a Master’s Loan Scheme in England designed to support widening access to explore the interplay between policy, social and personal factors in postgraduate education. In particular, they investigate whether the increase in average fees has posed the risk of reducing such schemes’ effectiveness in promoting social mobility, especially for debt-averse students. They find that financial concerns could deter some students, but the design of the scheme allowed many to consider postgraduate study when they had a positive undergraduate experience. However, alleviating the credit constraint may not be enough to widen access at Master’s level. Better information about such courses, more flexible delivery, and employment support, such as mentorship and work experience, and consideration of social and personal factors could help widen access to taught Master’s.

Wondwosen Tamrat’s qualitative study explores the nature of graduate employment in Ethiopia by examining the profile of the labour market, employability patterns, policies, strategies and initiatives taken at national and sectoral levels. It reveals that, while there are favourable policy directions, strategies, and initiatives for addressing the challenges of graduate employment, current achievements leave much to be desired. In addition to strengthening efforts at the level of higher education institutions and employers, combating graduate unemployment requires a broader conceptualisation and coherent national employability framework. Only this, he argues, could provide workable directions and sustainable strategies at all levels and with the required degree of synergy and participation from all relevant stakeholders.

Finally, Chao Liu, Wenqin Shen and Qiang Zha address the adoption and institutionalisation of university rankings as policy and strategic tools in China since the 1980s. They consider how policy initiatives, such as the ‘985 Project’ in 1998 and the ‘Double First-Class’ Project in 2016, intertwined with university rankings over time and provided opportunities for establishing such legitimacy. They also analyse the mechanisms by which university ranking outcomes gain legitimacy, and suggest that interactions among the stakeholders are one of the key mechanisms by which the central government plays a pivotal role in legitimising the adoption of international university ranking results. Furthermore, they argue that the universities have responded actively to adopting ranking outcomes and use them as strategic tools to achieve their own goals.