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Reconnecting Smart Thinkers with Communities in Search of Solutions

by Hamish Coates, Ellen Hazelkorn, Hans De Wit, Tessa DeLaquil, and Angel Calderon

This blog is based on the editorial for the latest issue of Policy Reviews in Higher Education

Executive Snapshot

All around the world, academics struggle to publish articles, editors grumble about review complexities, and communities raise eyebrows over the quality and relevance of the contributions. Unfortunately, readership and relevance seem to be inversely linked to the growing volume of papers. ‘Publish or perish’ anxieties have been overshadowed by concerns about ‘publishing in peril’ and a fading halo around university research.

These are serious issues for the academy. They are serious for editors, including for ourselves at Policy Reviews in Higher Education. Publication relevance matters professionally, and terms of the real-world of policy in which the journal plays. In our latest editorial we formulated steps towards a solution: Editing academic struggles in the era of robot instrumentalism

We also have clarified imperatives and concrete options to step ahead:

  • Academic networks and stakeholder communities should re-connect with each other
  • Journal papers should be connected through seminars, social media and blogs with the communities they are intended to benefit
  • Open webinars are a natural imperative for connecting the solutions posed in academic papers with the problems which prevail in broader communities e.g. Who will fund us? The drifting dynamics of “who pays for what” in higher education

The Big Lion in the Bush

Around the world students flock to universities in seemingly unprecedented numbers and with great zeal but questions abound regarding value-for-money as a result of rising costs and concerns about learner outcomes and quality. At the turn of century, the ‘world class era’ swept in a suite of mechanisms to define and distinguish excellence.

University rankings and other commercial firms positioned themselves as the arbiters of quality and value. In response, universities acquiesced and strove to distinguish themselves using the proffered metrics to build reputation and status and submit hordes of institutional data to be privatised by growing conglomerates. They compiled bibliometric lists to fluff-up brands and augment their purported reputation among academic communities, policymakers and wider society. Universities began to compel academic staff and doctoral students to publish as many journal papers as possible. This game has contributed to the overproduction of papers, of which many are questionable in terms of quality and relevance.

Creaks and hollowness in this game have grown to spur much angst as higher education providers in major powerhouse countries chase increasingly narrow goals. While hitherto profitable for publishers and rankings/ratings agencies, the situation is hardly sustainable. It has become difficult especially for young scholars who are compelled to publish to secure jobs and livelihoods, let alone to raise a family. The value contribution of this ‘publish or perish’ regime is yielding diminishing returns, especially in an era when computers have started citing themselves. Even more challenging is that among these young scholars, doctoral students are forced to publish articles as a requirement for the degree, and in several cases in replacement of the thesis. Not only does this increase the submission and acceptance challenge for them, but also transfers the responsibility of quality review from the supervisors to the journal editors and reviewers, already overloaded with submissions.

Millions of the world’s researchers now work in middle-income economies where far greater value could be given to highly trained faculty. And many of the world’s doctoral graduates will not pursue careers in academia yet are still required to publish as part of their doctoral programmes.

Making Differences not Just Papers

Clearly, university leaders  and researchers must work together to stake out a productive future for publishing research or face growing questions of relevance and mistrust. We contend that journal editors must step up to advocate for and design feasible options which go beyond those we find in place today. To have an impact on policy, the application and benefits of higher education research must be communicated appropriately to the wider community.

In a big lumpy world, we must embrace indeed create more diverse publication settings. Even as the robots flourish and do even better at ‘firing digital packets’ between themselves, there remains the problem of how we can promote the idea that publishing multiples of papers is not an end in itself.

It is time to promulgate institutional reforms which ensure that community service related to the academic functions of teaching and research at local, national, and international scales becomes integral to academic roles, beyond merely a focus on mass, global publication.

It is time to recognise more contextualised roles that brilliant academic talent already take in our communities and stop over-egging publication statistics.

Editors in applied fields of research must prioritise academic contributions which make real-world difference. It is ineffective to sit in offices producing ‘papers’ which sit within server farms chewing up fossil-fuelled energy and go nowhere near education communities, institutions, teachers, researchers, industries, or governments. ‘Open access’ has arguably broadened readership somewhat but has failed to reach key sections of society who live and work beyond the rich-world academy and thus address broader questions about substantive value. Indeed, it is ironic that the ‘impact’ forore operates within a paywall echo-chamber!

Academics need to get into their communities. Eating, sparking dialogue, engaging, advising, arguing and building, and linking with leaders and communities who do education, seem to endure as things that matter. It is understandable that certain countries are launching their own publication platforms.

Researchers need to find ways to better communicate their research to the broader societies they intend to serve and find meaningful ways from within their academic functions to respond to social changes. Words like ‘impact’ and ‘engagement’ have been invoked to retrofit relevance around academic practice, though with limited success. It is time to re-humanise academic life and rejoice in its corporeality.

With around half the humans and universities on the planet, it is coming time for Asia, Africa and Latin America to forge their own paths. Most rating agencies, publishers, journals, editors and reviewers are based in Europe and North America, while researcher and author communities are growing elsewhere, especially in Asia. The global system is not in balance, and with the disharmony compounded by politics and competitive tension, it is unlikely that current arrangements will be sustained in coming years, especially given that research in non-Western regions is sprouting and flourishing.

Bringing Thinking Humans Together

A paper which is good for publication is also good for promotion, and for pontification, and pioneering. As academic publication has grown, researchers have become often dangerously detached from the communities they are constituted to serve. Is it too wild to expect that editors should only publish situated papers which are potentially going to have a genuine impact on communities? No, this is not crazy thinking. It is post-digital thinking that reclaims community and collegial purpose in ways which even global tech leaders have started to advocate.

Obviously, there are infinite ways to re-kindle connections between academics and communities. Online webinars are a great way to begin. In 2026 Policy Reviews in Higher Education launched an online global series of webinars. Lamenting the lack of dialogue between policy researchers and policymakers, the journal editors had previously forged links between published papers and blogs and social media.

The webinars shift outreach and engagement to the next level. While modest in terms of contemporary social media ecosystems, such efforts are reasonably venturesome for journals which have grown beyond their initial scholar community and into a global and very much larger world. ‘Global’ has a great ring to it but also implies simultaneously ‘everything to everyone’ and ‘nothing to no-one’. Webinars restore human connection, moving papers and ideas and intellectual advocacy beyond server farms back into real professional, institutional and social lives.

The very first webinar focused on ‘Striving for recognition: University manoeuvres for societal outcomes’. As nations have called for universities to serve different communities, institutions have sought different ways to succeed. Desideria Cempaka Wijaya Murti contributed from Indonesia, Michael Fung and Sabur Butt from Mexico, and Michael Shattock from the United Kingdom. The three policy pitches provided perspectives from their respective countries / regions and highlighted emerging research trends and present thought-provoking ideas to help shape future policy directions.

Webinar number two focused on a hot topic of our times: ‘Transnational education (TNE) in the wild: Quality shocks, international anarchy, and academic disconnection. The three policy pitches approached this phenomenon from distinct yet complementary perspectives. Jason E. Lane (United States) talked about geopolitical infrastructure, Lilan Chen (Japan) provided compelling insights into student-centred quality and access, and Jeanette Baird (Australia, Papua New Guinea) gave expert insights into tertiary regulation and risk governance. Together, the discussion highlighted the growing complexity of TNE and the need to better understand its implications for students, institutions, governments, and societies.

The third webinar focuses on money, pricing, transparency, and value. It is titled: ‘Who will fund us? The drifting dynamics of “who pays for what” in higher education’. This webinar will explore questions around who pays and what kind of service to expect and need into the future.  The policy pitches will be made by Christopher Millward (United Kingdom), N.V. Varghese (India), Lorraine Dearden (United Kingdom) and Huw Morris (United Kingdom). Almost everything which is known about higher education funding refers to rich countries. With major growth now erupting in Africa, ASEAN and Eurasia, it is time to build evidence and dialogue into other situations and growth options.

We are lucky to work as professionals across the fantastic and expanding tertiary landscape. Now is a time for us to work together to co-create new futures. We have no time to wring our hands and give up higher thinking to commercial raters. We cannot afford to let computer scientists and accountants alone define all the futures. These professionals are part of our broader academic and professional community. They need our help as much as we need theirs. The challenges and opportunities before us are great. We need all experts to work together.

Hamish Coates is a global leader in higher education with major contributions to policy and innovation who designs and strengthens higher education systems, institutions and leadership.

Ellen Hazelkorn is Joint Managing Partner, BH Associates education consultants, and Professor Emeritus, Technological University Dublin (Ireland).

Hans de Wit is Professor Emeritus of the Practice and Distinguished Fellow and Former Director (2015-2020) of the Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, USA.

Tessa DeLaquil is Associate Professor at the Department for Pedagogy and Lifelong Learning at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Angel Calderon is director, strategic insights, at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.


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When papers become currency

by Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela

Over the last few months, I have found myself discussing academic publishing with young researchers in Germany and Chile. What struck me in both places was not excitement about ideas, journals or scholarly debates. It was anxiety.

At workshops on publishing strategies and scholarly journals (one at the HoFoNa Conference in Germany and another at the Institute of Education at the University of Chile) the conversations quickly moved away from writing itself and towards something far more pragmatic: survival.

Young researchers spoke about publishing in highly strategic terms. Which journals were ‘safe’? Which ones counted for postdoctoral applications and funding schemes? Which journals’ turnarounds were quick enough? Which journals offered the highest probability of acceptance?

Several participants openly discussed how they calculated publication decisions in relation to career survival. The question was often not where their work fitted best intellectually, but which journals were fast enough, prestigious enough and predictable enough to maximise their chances of securing a postdoctoral position, grant or future contract.

What I found quite revealing was how naturally many early-career academics now speak the language of optimisation. Quartiles, Article Processing Charges (APCs), turnaround times, indexing systems, impact factors and publication strategies are discussed with remarkable fluency. Many young researchers are being socialised into academia through the logic of strategic productivity before they have had the opportunity to develop a slower intellectual voice of their own.

And who can blame them?

Across many universities today, academic life has become increasingly precarious and accelerated. Temporary contracts, short-term postdoctoral positions, uncertain funding, metric-driven evaluations and intense competition have transformed publishing into something far more strategic than it was. In systems (such as Chile’s), where academic careers and funding schemes heavily depend on publications indexed in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, papers increasingly function as academic currency.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that publishers promising continuous publication, high-volume output and relatively predictable editorial processes have expanded rapidly. This is one reason why publishers such as MDPI and Frontiers have become so deeply embedded within contemporary academic life. Some of their journals are indexed in WoS and Scopus, which count towards grants and promotions and contribute directly to institutional rankings and evaluation systems. In other words, they are not operating outside the university system. They are increasingly part of how the system itself functions.

It is fair to say, though, that some established journals are reporting turnaround times that are not radically different from publishers such as Frontiers or MDPI. Elements of acceleration and compressed editorial timelines are also becoming increasingly visible across the wider publishing ecosystem, suggesting that these dynamics are no longer confined to specific publishers.

In any case, average turnaround statistics do not fully capture broader differences in selectivity, publication scale, editorial oversight and peer review intensity. During my years as Coordinating Editor of Higher Education, manuscripts frequently went through several rounds of major revision over many months. Reviewer disagreement, editorial discussion and substantial intellectual reshaping were often central parts of the process. The deeper question, then, may not simply be speed itself, but whether meaningful scholarly judgement, rigorous peer review and sustained intellectual critique can realistically be maintained under conditions of industrial-scale publication.

This becomes particularly important in a publishing ecosystem increasingly organised around scale. Large editorial boards, continuous publication models and relatively low desk-rejection rates create a parallel publishing universe in which the formal conventions of academic publishing are maintained, but where critique, filtering and editorial curation risk becoming increasingly compressed and uneven.

APCs have also reshaped inequalities within academic publishing. Publishing open access in prestigious journals often depends on fees that remain inaccessible for universities and researchers in Latin America, Africa and other underfunded academic systems unless institutions are able to absorb the costs.

At the same time, substantial APCs are no longer confined to traditionally prestigious journals. Many high-volume publishing models also involve significant publication fees, suggesting that what many early-career researchers are increasingly paying for is not simply open access, but speed, predictability and reduced temporal uncertainty within an academic system governed by short-term contracts, funding deadlines and metric-based evaluations. In short, they are purchasing life chances.

The irony is difficult to ignore. The same universities and funding systems that demand constant productivity often make meaningful participation in prestigious publishing circuits governed by international rankings, indexing systems and performance metrics.

Meanwhile, reviewers, the invisible infrastructure sustaining the entire system, are visibly exhausted. Every week, I receive multiple emails asking me to review manuscripts within ten or fourteen days. Some are oddly urgent in tone, politely aggressive, reminding reviewers about editorial targets and turnaround times. Many read as though they were generated from the same automated template. At this stage, I rarely even reply. I simply delete them. What concerns me is not only the pressure itself, but how normalised this publication culture has become.

Sometimes the system reaches extremes. In Chile, recent controversies surrounding publication incentives revealed academics producing absurd numbers of WoS indexed papers while receiving substantial productivity-linked salaries and bonuses. In some cases, this meant publishing well over one hundred papers in a single year. The issue here is not simply individual behaviour. The deeper question is structural: what kind of national research funding system rewards institutions according to publication output and, in turn, transfers these pressures directly onto academics?

Artificial intelligence is likely to intensify these dynamics even further. AI did not create the culture of academic hyperproduction, but it is accelerating it dramatically. Faster writing. Faster reviewing. Faster summarising. Faster publishing. More output everywhere.  And less time for, or even interest in, thought as a result.

None of this means that traditional academic publishing represented an egalitarian system. It has long been shaped by oligopolistic publishers, exclusionary gatekeeping and profound global inequalities. Open access has unquestionably expanded the circulation of knowledge and enabled greater visibility for scholars outside elite institutions. Some forms of academic closure deserved to be challenged. But something important may also be getting lost.

During those workshops in Germany and Chile, I observed that many young researchers seemed caught between two incompatible temporalities: the time required for meaningful scholarship and the accelerated pace demanded by contemporary academic careers. That tension, more than any individual journal or publisher, surely represents one of the defining conditions of academic life today.

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela serves on the SRHE Governing Council. She is a Serra Húnter Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) and Senior Research Fellow at the Universidad de Tarapacá (Chile). Her work focuses on higher education, epistemic justice, decolonial perspectives, and inequalities in global knowledge production, particularly in Latin America.

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Sneering at ‘low quality’ universities and their students is not the way to equalise educational opportunities

by Rob Cuthbert

Jamie Doward reported for The Observer on 26 January 2020 on recent research by Stuart Campbell, Lindsey Macmillan, Richard Murphy and Gill Wyness of UCL’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP Discussion Paper No 1647 August 2019 Inequalities in Student to Course Match: Evidence from Linked Administrative Data). Their report said: “We find sizeable socio-economic gaps in academic and earnings match across the attainment distribution, with low SES [socioeconomic status] students consistently undermatching, attending courses with lower attaining peers and lower expected earnings than their richer counterparts.” So far, so good, and no surprise. The paper is largely careful in using factual or objective descriptions, but then it explains its methods thus: “Calculate course quality: we rank each university-course combination in a distribution of course quality, based on either (i) The median of the best three age 18 exam results of students on the course (academic-based), or (ii) The median earnings outcomes of an earlier cohort of students on the subject 5 years after graduation (earnings-based).” So quality is deliberately aligned with difficulty of entry or future earnings potential – both of which are more likely to be associated with the prestige of the course and location of the university, and may have nothing to do with the educational or academic quality of the course. The argument is circular: “People with good A levels do high-quality courses. How do we know they’re high-quality? Because people with good A levels take them[1].” Worse, Gill Wyness is quoted in The Observer article as saying: “You’re much more likely to go to your local university if you are from a poorer background. But if you look at all the students who go to a university that is near them, the disadvantaged kids will still go to a lower-quality university than the advantaged kids.” She has no compunction in generalising from supposed ‘low quality’ courses to whole supposed ‘low quality’ universities.

The ‘low quality’ narrative is up and running, reinforced by right wing commentators like Iain Mansfield, a prolific tweeter now at the Policy Exchange think tank, previously a special adviser to Jo Johnson as Minister for Higher Education. He was quoted in Times Higher Education on 27 January 2020 as saying an Ofsted for universities regime could “come to be seen as needed if the major issue of low-quality provision isn’t tackled … I think it would be a last resort and it would be quite undesirable for our sector.” Mansfield, who developed the teaching excellence framework as a senior civil servant in the Department for Education, also said that “…’poor quality provision’ can already be identified via existing measures: dropout rates, the TEF and graduate employment data, as well as figures on grade inflation and unconditional offers”, as John Morgan reported. It is alarming that a recent senior DfE civil servant so readily accepts these as ‘measures’ of ‘quality’, when each is riddled with ambiguity. If DfE civil servants were drawn more from the ranks of people with actual teaching experience, they might have a better appreciation of what these ‘measures’ actually signify.

Drop-out rates: are higher for disadvantaged students, but many such students leave for non-academic reasons.If ‘course quality’ means high standards we might expect it to be correlated with comparatively high drop-out rates. Did you mean low drop-out rates imply lower quality? No, we thought not.

TEF: TEF has little to do with teaching or excellence: as SRHE Fellow Rosemary Deem (Royal Holloway) and Jo-Anne Baird (Oxford) argued in the Journal of Educational Change  in 2019: “… the English TEF is not about improving teaching but rather an endeavour to pit universities against each other in a highly marketised competitive system …”. Universities, of course, do little to help by trumpeting TEF Gold awards, bearing out the Deem/Baird argument.

Graduate employment data: can often be a function of postcode: the data “could be telling us that a public school dropout working at an upmarket estate agent in Kensington earns as much as a recent graduate working part-time in Bolton”, according to David Willetts, the Minister who commissioned the longitudinal educational outcomes project. He warned that: “Graduate earnings rarely afford good policymaking”.

Grade inflation: for many years Russell Group universities have led the way in grade inflation. Is this a marker of low quality? Some, perhaps most, of what the OfS likes to call ‘unexplained’ improvement in grades might actually be accounted for by long-term improvements in teaching, teachers and school leaver attainment.

Unconditional offers: If government exhorts universities over many years to behave as if they are in a market, they can hardly be blamed for trying to induce their potential student-consumers to choose them over their competitors, by making unconditional or ‘conditional unconditional’ offers. The evidence on unconditional offers is mixed (see Ratcliffe v Dandridge in January 2020) in terms of their impact on students’ motivation for A-levels. At the least, an unconditional offer of any kind is an indication that the university is confident this student will succeed. Harrumphing by Government ministers and the OfS is disingenuous and may work against diversity in the student population.

The ‘low quality’ narrative protects and extends the current stratification of prestige in HE, by abusing the universities which cater for the majority of UK HE students, and abusing their students for choosing to attend them. While that may be no more than we expect from some parts of the political spectrum, we are entitled to expect more concern for evidence and rigour from academic researchers. Lindsey Macmillan and Gill Wyness, two of the co-authors of the recent CEP paper, are respectively Director and Deputy Director of UCL’s Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities. ‘Impact’ seems to take precedence over rigour here, because this research has nothing to say about ‘course quality’. The message of their research is that high-achieving students from low SES backgrounds choose to attend universities other than those they might have considered and for which they were apparently qualified. Perhaps those students think the places they actually choose offer the best-quality education for them. What happened to informed student choice? Clearly, the UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities thinks low SES students don’t know what’s best for them, and wants to change things by sneering at those students and the ‘low quality’ universities they persist in choosing. They think ‘student choice’ means forcing a larger number of disadvantaged students to go to ‘high-quality’ universities against their wishes. Is this what is meant by ‘high-quality’ research?  

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and Blog. He has been a student, teacher, researcher and manager in a wide range of universities, chair of Aimhigher South West, a member of HEFCE’s Widening Participation Strategic Committee, adviser to the DES on the establishment of the Office for Fair Access, and a senior adviser at the Higher Education Academy.

[1] My thanks to Paul Temple for this observation.