Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 142 p. : ill. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-110).

Many colleges and universities with historic relationships to religious organizations either have abandoned those relationships altogether or maintain the relationships in name only. Other church-related institutions remain deeply defined by their religious affiliation and require students and faculty to affirm certain creeds, practices and studies. Between these extremes, some institutions maintain a meaningful church relationship while embracing full academic freedom and building a faculty and student body that is richly diverse in every way. The leadership of the president may be critical to preserving the creative tension that allows the academy to prosper while drawing meaning from a church relationship. This study of executive leadership in church-related higher education sought to understand this form of leadership. The study joined conversations in the literature about leadership and about church-related higher education. The study utilized interactive qualitative analysis (Northcutt & McCoy, 2004) to identify nine elements in the system of executive leadership in church-related higher education. The study produced a theoretical model that allowed the researcher to describe the relationships that exist among the elements in the system, to explain the cause of existing conditions in the system, to predict the future results of actions on the system, and to discuss the impact of extrasystemic influences on the system. The study compared the different understandings of presidents, faculty members, and church leaders who serve as trustees. The results of the study indicated that primal leadership (Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee, 2002) was the most relevant existing leadership theory for understanding the system described in this study. This study had primary value for persons who provide executive leadership in church-related higher education and for persons who select, evaluate, support and work with executive leaders in church-related higher education. This study had secondary value for persons who study executive leadership in all of higher education and for persons who study the interface between the general literature on leadership and specific understandings of leadership in higher education. / text

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

This research aims to explore how higher education institutions in Hong Kong increase their competitiveness via strategic management; provide comparative strategic management approaches of 4 kinds of higher education institutions and the relationship of strategic management and quality assurance. First of all, it will be divided into two parts, namely, external-prospective and internal-prospective. The first part is external-prospective. In this session, the foci will be outside the universities. It will start from the global trend of higher education, the purposes of higher education, and institutional mergers. Internal prospective mainly focuses on the institution itself. This part will be conducted by looking at the areas of institutional governance and quality assurance. It will provide some statistical analysis to compare the higher education institutions in Hong Kong. For example, achievement, mission statement, the scale of international students to local students, international faculties, international project as well as partnership with other institutions and organizations. In addition, this paper will also explore the correlation of strategic and quality assurance in higher education. Starting from 2000, the higher education in Hong Kong, especially in the sub-degree sector, developed very rapidly. Such dramatic expansion in post-secondary education has raised a serious questions on how to maintain the quality, performance as well as the overall standard in the entire sector under sustainable increase in number of students and the number of institutions which providing the sub-degree programmes. In this regard, quality assurance in higher education is the foundation stone to uphold the entire development of the higher education sector. In view of the abovementioned approaches to this research paper, the hypotheses to be tested are (1) it is believed that the relationship among the competitiveness of universities, international benchmarking of universities and implementing strategic management is highly interrelated. (2) Under increasing competition in higher education sector in Hong Kong, local universities are increasingly using strategic plans to help their divisions achieve realizable goals and get more or better financial and human resources from a variety of stakeholder groups, and (3) there is a positive correlation between strategic management and quality assurance in higher education sector. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Introducing a new performance-based review with 100% support from staff in a well-established university is difficult for the university management. Apart from measuring whether regulations have been followed or not, acceptance of academic staff is one key area that educational organizations should not ignore when evaluating effectiveness of a performance-based policy. Using the case university as an example, this study aims at investigating academic staff’s perceptions of gradually introducing an array of performance-based review policies, its design and its success in enhancing quality. By conducting in-depth interviews with eight academic staff in the case university, suggestions to improve the performance-based review policy have also been collected. Findings showed that academic staff basically supported its implementation and believed that it could bring positive impacts to the case university. Major areas of concerns of academic staff, which included assessment criteria, focus of university development, flexibility, reviewer composition and motivation, could be considered by peer universities when designing their own performance-based review policies and promote their policy effectiveness. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

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M. Tech. Public Management / Granting admission to students using various entrance requirements in Further Education and Training (FET) colleges presents a huge challenge. The criteria have proved to be inadequate to meet this challenge. According to the Department of Higher Education and Training, the aim is to develop economies of scale and create capacity within colleges, to reach more students and offer a wide range of programmes, thereby positioning them to meet social and economic demands. However, the challenge still exists. The demand to produce skilled youth is escalating rapidly, hence some students opt to further their studies at FET colleges even if they have completed grade 12 and when, on completion, they will receive the same National Qualification Framework (NQF) level 4 certificates. The study is aimed at investigating the effects of using various admission requirements at FET Colleges, as well as to recommend measures which could be taken to overcome the challenges.

It is widely accepted that the educational system of universities has to provide an academic environment that may serve as a catalysts for high-technology start-ups. The academic tradition of entrepreneurship in German-speaking countries is very short. Until recently, fostering innovations and new product development through entrepreneurship has not been regarded as a primary task of universities. However, perspectives have changed in this respect, and there have been numerous attempts to enhance the role of university graduates as founders of innovative businesses. In this paper, we compare the entrepreneurial intentions of students at two German-speaking universities (the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration and the University of Munich) with the corresponding results for a leading institution in this field: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We find very distinct patterns of entrepreneurial spirit in these universities. The results also suggest that the lower level of founding intentions among students in Munich and Vienna may be attributed to their less distinctive entrepreneurship education. This leaves a great deal of room for improvement. (author's abstract)

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