Sandra Hasanefendic and Hugo Horta A couple of years ago, I read a sentence that stuck with me ever since: “Our world has changed but our schools have not.” It was one of the sentences from Tony Wagner’s book “The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our […]

Que Anh Dang The Bologna Process (BP) and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Education Process – each brings together some 50 member countries and a handful of international organisations – have become major regional and inter-regional higher education projects and generated many research papers. However, both the Bologna and ASEM Education Secretariat that have been contributing […]

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Jens Jungblut, Pauline Ravinet, and Martina Vukasovic In this thematic issue of Policy and Society (all contributions are openly accessible), we highlight the multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-issue (the ‘multi-s’) nature of public policy using the case of higher education policies. We begin with an overview of how the global shift towards knowledge-based economies […]

Ten years after its establishment, the European Research Council is largely seen as a success story. In his new book The European Research Council political scientist and former scientific advisor to the president of the European Research Council Thomas König provides a detailed account of often very complex history on how this success story of […]

Andrea Gideon The main activities of higher education institutions (HEIs), teaching and research, have in recent years started to be influenced by EU law. For example, Austria and Belgium had to make changes in the past to their free and open access to higher education policies,[1] the German study grant Bafög had been subject to […]

Hannah Moscovitz Around the world, the social role of higher education has garnered interest and generated important discussion. It is commonly agreed that alongside their research and teaching functions, academic institutions should also promote what has been termed their “third mission”. Important efforts have been made in recent years to further the understanding of the […]

Julian L. Garritzmann Students in Finland and Germany study free of charge. In the U.S. and in Japan, in contrast, they pay tremendous tuition fees, leading to often six-digit student debt amounts after graduation. At the same time, most students in Finland and in the U.S. receive public financial student aid, while the majority of […]