HSE Researchers at the Annual ASHE Conference in Denver
On 4th - 7th November the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, ASHE took place in Denver, Colorado. Incorporated in 1976 ASHE is the oldest professional association in higher education studies and has more than 2,000 members, mostly Americans.
ASHE aims to assist the development of international cooperation in the field through academic research, conferences and publications and by attracting academics around the world to work with the Association. A prestigious event for specialists in higher education studies, ASHE is regarded as one of 3 or 4 ‘must participate’ conferences in the calendar and is attended by researchers from all across the planet. This year, at the 40th conference more than a thousand people came to discuss ideas on ‘Inequality and Higher Education’ - a key topic for the international research community in this area of study.
HSE sent a formidable delegation including Academic Supervisor at the Institute of Education Isak Froumin, Research Fellows Sergei Malinovsky, Igor Chirikov, Dmitry Semenov and Anna Smolentseva. They took part in Pre-conferences focussing on international comparative research at the Council on Public Policy in Higher Education (CPPHE).
Our colleagues participated in the conference in many varied ways. Sergei Malinovsky gave his paper at a session on studying how higher education for mass consumption has affected providing equal access to education. Sergei’s paper examined the question 'Massification of higher education and part-time study in Russia: wider participation or segmentation driver?' He considered whether the part-time segment enabled diversification at a regional and institutional level and followed the trajectories of part-time students.
Isak Froumin and Anna Smolentseva (Anna was programme chair for the Council on International Higher Education, CIHE, this year) worked in the session on Equity Stratification and Governance in High Participation Systems of Higher Education. At the roundtable 'From Soviet Model to Where? A Comparative Analysis of the Transformations of the Institutional Landscape in Post-Soviet Countries', Dmitry Semenov presented his results on analysing the Russian case in his report Higher education system dynamics and institutional diversity in post-Soviet countries.Igor Chirikov joined the discussions in one roundtable and chaired two others.
‘These kinds of events help us to evaluate local country issues in a comparative perspective,’ says Sergei Malinovsky, ‘and to understand whether we speak the same language as other researchers, and whether our approaches to analysis and theory are the same or different.’
As a result of the conference, HSE has made an agreement with the University of Bath about possibly working together on a research project to study the institutional dynamics of universities.