Higher Dead End?

Abstract

One of the main problems of Finnish higher education researcher training is the lack of any systematic training. It seems, however, that it is not only one of the main problems but also a result of a development related to the structure of funding sources and the status of higher education research as an academic field. In this article I will begin by describing how this situation has developed and what are the current problems. Secondly, I will reflect on the future avenues of higher education research and researcher training, which seem to be approaching a (higher) dead end. The article is based on personal experiences gained as a researcher in several higher education research projects and on relevant research literature and is supported by discussions with my colleagues at the Institute for Educational Research. Following the academic rules of the game I should, however, like to begin with the definition of higher education research that will be applied in this article. Higher education studies examine practical problems in higher education with the help of various theories and methods with a view to solving these problems. This definition has two elements. First, it admits that higher education research is not an independent discipline but an object-focused field of research which is primarily defined by the object of its analysis, as Teichler (1996) observed. This assumption is supported by theoretical discussions which emphasize that higher education differs from other social systems because it produces new knowledge (Becher & Kogan 1992; Clark 1983). The definition also maintains that higher education research is an applied field of research because it should be able to reveal – or even find so-