University Prestige Research Articles

A cultural models approach to understanding body fatness perceptions and disordered eating in young South Korean men.

The eating disorders field has been limited by a predominant focus on White, Western women, and there is growing recognition of the need to understand cross-cultural variation in key constructs (i.e., ideal body types). A transdisciplinary, cultural models approach systematizes the incorporation of an "emic" perspective (a culture's own understandings of phenomena) into assessments of relationships between body shapes and eating disorders. Eighty-one young South Korean men aged 19-34 years living in Seoul participated in this research. A cultural model of body fatness was identified using cultural consensus analysis during 18 months of ethnographic, mixed-methods fieldwork. Participants also completed questionnaires assessing age, height, weight, sexual identity, university prestige, body dissatisfaction, eating disorder symptoms, and cultural consonance with the Korean cultural model of the ideal male body. Variation in these factors was analyzed using a series of chi-squares and analyses of variance with the culturally defined categories of body fatness as the independent variables. Cultural consensus analysis found that young South Korean men are consistent in identifying categories of "too thin," "balanced," and "too fat." The "balanced" category contained the lowest proportion of high-prestige university attendees and the highest average cultural consonance. The "too fat" category was characterized by the highest levels of body dissatisfaction and dieting, as well as proportion of probable eating disorders. A cultural models approach identified culturally important factors and patterns in disordered eating among young South Korean men and may be effective for understanding eating disorders in other populations not typically studied. This study applies a systematic, "emic" perspective to young South Korean men's body ideals. Young Korean men share a cultural model of body fatness, and this model frames how they experience risk for eating disorders. This study demonstrates a method for incorporating culture into research on eating disorder risk.

Neural embeddings of scientific mobility reveal the stratification of institutions in China

We are trying to reveal the status of Chinese universities in the global talent circulation system and how university prestige affects mobility patterns in China. Other than geographic distance, we configured a two-dimensional Euclidean space of the neural embeddings of institutions from scientists’ mobility trajectories. To be specific, we acquired the scientific mobility trajectories based on about 3,055,409 authors from 108 thousand affiliations and used the word2vec neural embedding model to encode affiliations into a continuous 100-dimensional embedding space and then further map the 55,298 distinct embeddings into the two-dimensional space. We found that in the current talent circulation system, China is furthest from the scientific center with a closeness of 0.08 and has a median diversity of 0.15 among the top 10 countries with the most affiliations, indicating relatively less communication with other international institutions and moderate diversity of communication patterns within the country. Furthermore, using the regression models, we found that for the universities on China's mainland, the effects of prestige are positive on the volumes of scientific mobility (all pvalues<0.001) and on the uniqueness of universities (all pvalues<0.1), revealing the stratifications of universities in the talent circulation. The interaction of prestige and regional economic status is also discussed in our results. This work gives policy implications to university development, knowledge circulation, and career development in science.

Intra-clan marriage in modern times: the role of elite education in assortative mating

Studies have shown a tendency for educational elites to marry within the elite circle in China. However, little research explores how they find a partner and the platforms’ roles in the process. We fill this gap by focusing on an online dating platform targeting alumni of elite universities. We interviewed the core staff of the platform to examine its operations. Through thematic analysis, we analyzed users’ self-representations in their dating profiles and the platform’s relatively high matching success rate. To achieve assortative matching for its elite users, the platform developed a large elite user base by setting university prestige as a dating threshold, hiring staff from elite universities, and providing profile editing and posting services. Users highlighted their privileged family backgrounds, elite university experiences, time-consuming hobbies, and preferences for a soulmate, as they aimed to attract similar partners. Our research reveals a new form of intra-clan marriage that has emerged with the massification of higher education. This homogamy, based on high levels of cultural capital, forms a social enclosure that may reinforce cultural inequalities beyond higher education.

Global Partnership in Education as an Enhancement of University Prestige and Economic Impact

Global Partnership in Education as an Enhancement of University Prestige and Economic Impact

How Do Science Journalists Evaluate Psychology Research?

What information do science journalists use when evaluating psychology findings? We examined this in a preregistered, controlled experiment by manipulating four factors in descriptions of fictitious behavioral-psychology studies: (a) the study’s sample size, (b) the representativeness of the study’s sample, (c) the p value associated with the finding, and (d) institutional prestige of the researcher who conducted the study. We investigated the effects of these manipulations on 181 real journalists’ perceptions of each study’s trustworthiness and newsworthiness. Sample size was the only factor that had a robust influence on journalists’ ratings of how trustworthy and newsworthy a finding was; larger sample sizes led to an increase of about two-thirds of 1 point on a 7-point scale. University prestige had no effect in this controlled setting, and the effects of sample representativeness and of p values were inconclusive, but any effects in this setting are likely quite small. Exploratory analyses suggest that other types of prestige might be more important (i.e., journal prestige) and that study design (experimental vs. correlational) may also affect trustworthiness and newsworthiness.

Does Competition Among Universities for Ranking Affect College Students' General Self-Efficacy in China?

General self-efficacy depends on self-belief and the external environment. For college students, the competition among universities for ranking serves as an external environment. In this study, the author demonstrates the impact of competition among universities for ranking on college students' general self-efficacy. A growth mindset, which refers to the belief that one's abilities can be developed over time, is proposed to moderate this effect. Three questionnaires collected 43 students' responses on their awareness of university ranking, general self-efficacy, and mindset. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to produce the results. The results suggest that gender is a significant moderator and that a growth mindset functions as a practical means for increasing a students general self-efficacy in the context of competitive higher education. The study found that male students were positively affected by the competition among universities for ranking, while female students were negatively affected. The findings highlight the importance of jointly considering university prestige, gender, and mindset to understand general self-efficacy.

The antecedents of university loyalty: a study of postgraduate students in Malaysia

PurposeThis study investigates the antecedents of student loyalty towards universities. This study offers new insights into postgraduate loyalty in the context of the Malaysian higher education industry.Design/methodology/approachPartial least squares structural equation modelling is used to analyse data obtained from a survey of 231 postgraduate students in Malaysia.FindingsThe findings indicate that there is a significant relationship between price value and both student satisfaction and student loyalty. There are also strong relationships between learning environment and student satisfaction and between student satisfaction and student loyalty. While university prestige showed a significant relationship with student satisfaction, it is not related to student loyalty. Another important finding is that price value has a strong and direct relationship with both student satisfaction and student loyalty.Originality/valueThis study presents an updated empirical model of student loyalty. Contrary to previous studies, the results indicate that service quality is not related to student satisfaction. However, it is found to influence student loyalty towards the University. The results also indicate the important mediating effect of student satisfaction. This is the first study to look specifically at student satisfaction and loyalty of postgraduate students in Malaysia.

Do university trademarks matter? Interaction between university-related apparel style and licensing status

PurposeBased on cue utilization theory, this study aims to examine effects of the style (fashion vs basic) and licensing status (licensed vs nonlicensed) of university-related apparel products (URAPs) as intrinsic and extrinsic cues, respectively, impacting university fans’ responses (i.e. attitudes, purchase intentions and purchase behaviors) and the moderating roles of personal factors (i.e. perceived university prestige, quality consciousness and uniqueness seeking).Design/methodology/approachData were collected via an online quasi-experiment employing a 2 (licensing status: licensed vs nonlicensed) × 2 (style: basic vs fashion) within-subjects design with a purposeful sample of 1,126 students and alumni of a Southeastern American university.FindingsResults show that consumers generally responded more favorably to licensed (vs nonlicensed) URAPs, especially for basic styles, whereas their responses to fashionable URAPs were more favorable for nonlicensed (vs licensed) URAPs. Furthermore, the positive effects of licensing status were stronger for consumers with high (vs low) perceived university prestige or quality consciousness. Consumers generally more favorably responded to basic (vs fashion) URAPs, but this style effect was weaker among those with a high (vs low) uniqueness seeking tendency.Originality/valueTheoretical explanations on URAP consumption have been scant in the product and brand management literature. This study fills this literature gap by conceptualizing extrinsic (i.e. licensing status) and intrinsic (i.e. style) cues crucial in URAP consumption from a cue utilization theory lens and demonstrating empirical evidence for the intricate interplays among the two cues and diverse personal characteristics.

Prestige and technology-transaction prices: Evidence from patent-selling by Chinese universities

Pricing is important to the functioning of markets for technology. A considerable body of research has studied how various factors contribute to determining prices, yet the effects of both technology providers’ and buyers’ prestige on prices remain underexplored. This study investigates how prestige affects pricing in university–firm technology transactions. We argue that prestige shapes prices by influencing both technology valuation and negotiations. Using transaction data on patented university technologies in Zhejiang Province in China during the period spanning 2017–2019, we examine the relationship between inventor team prestige and transaction prices. We also investigate how this relationship depends on organizational prestige, specifically that of a supplying university and a buying firm. We find a positive relationship between inventor team prestige and transaction prices. Furthermore, this relationship is positively moderated by university prestige, while it is negatively moderated by firm prestige. This study generates implications for universities as they manage technology transfer to firms.

A discipline-wide investigation of the replicability of Psychology papers over the past two decades

Conjecture about the weak replicability in social sciences has made scholars eager to quantify the scale and scope of replication failure for a discipline. Yet small-scale manual replication methods alone are ill-suited to deal with this big data problem. Here, we conduct a discipline-wide replication census in science. Our sample (N = 14,126 papers) covers nearly all papers published in the six top-tier Psychology journals over the past 20 y. Using a validated machine learning model that estimates a paper's likelihood of replication, we found evidence that both supports and refutes speculations drawn from a relatively small sample of manual replications. First, we find that a single overall replication rate of Psychology poorly captures the varying degree of replicability among subfields. Second, we find that replication rates are strongly correlated with research methods in all subfields. Experiments replicate at a significantly lower rate than do non-experimental studies. Third, we find that authors' cumulative publication number and citation impact are positively related to the likelihood of replication, while other proxies of research quality and rigor, such as an author's university prestige and a paper's citations, are unrelated to replicability. Finally, contrary to the ideal that media attention should cover replicable research, we find that media attention is positively related to the likelihood of replication failure. Our assessments of the scale and scope of replicability are important next steps toward broadly resolving issues of replicability.

Cultural consonance, body image, and disordered eating among young South Korean men

Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses, but little research explores non-Western men's cultural experiences of body image and what affects their risks of disordered eating. Drawing on data collected over 17 months (August 2019 to January 2021) of fieldwork in Seoul, South Korea, the lens of intersectionality is employed alongside multiple regression and moderation analysis to understand how two axes of identity which emerged as important from the ethnography—sexual identity and university prestige—shape the ways in which young Korean men's cultural consonance with their local model of the ideal male body, influenced heavily by the kkonminam (flower boy), relates to risk for developing an eating disorder. Among young Korean men, intersections of university prestige and sexual identity frame embodiment of cultural models of male body image as a strategy for the making and maintenance of social relations and the advancement of social status in a precarious neoliberal economy.

Forum: Gendered Dynamics of Academic Networks

Abstract This forum examines whether scholars’ access to networks in the international studies profession is gendered and if so, the consequences of those networks for personal and professional success. Academic networks that encompass both professional and personal connections have been proposed as one solution to chilly climate issues because they provide a dual function of enhancing scholarly productivity and inclusion in the profession. The articles in the forum consider both professional (e.g., citation) and personal (e.g., mentorship, friendship) networks, as well as traditional (e.g., invited talks) and nontraditional (e.g., social media) networks. The authors show that biases that arise through the gendered nature of academic networks can be mitigated through social media, mentoring, and friendship networks. However, we must also be cognizant of other factors that create barriers for women in the profession (e.g., university prestige, parenthood, COVID-19).

Management factors influencing lecturers' research productivity in Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam: A structural equation modeling analysis

Increasing lecturers' research productivity plays a crucial role in improving teaching quality and university prestige. This research aims to establish and test a model for evaluating management factors that affect the research productivity of Vietnamese university lecturers. Data were collected by surveying 398 lecturers and researchers at universities affiliated with the Vietnam National University, Hanoi (VNU). Structural equation modeling (SEM) methodology was applied for data analysis. The research outcomes indicate that resources and policies to favor research activities are the two most influential factors affecting research productivity in lecturers. The decentralization factor, in contrast, did not show statistical significance, since its p-value was greater than 0.05. Based on the results obtained, several policy recommendations are proposed, namely: (i) ensuring resources for faculty’s scientific research activities; (ii) improving policies for lecturers to enhance their scientific research achievements: (iii) developing strategies for scientific research activities; (iv) enhancing awareness of affiliated unit leaders about the importance of scientific research.

Elite recruitment in US finance: How university prestige is used to secure top executive positions.

Status attainment theories assert that individuals are recruited based on the length and functional background of their training. Elite theories assume that top managers often deviate from these socially acceptable mechanisms of status attainment to entrench their advantage. In this study, focusing on the US financial sector, we investigate whether educational institution prestige—rather than the subject or length of education—increasingly influences appointments to top executive positions. We analyze 1987 US top executive managers affiliated with 147 firms from both financial and non‐financial sectors in 2005 and 2018. Our study demonstrates that alumni of prestigious universities have a strikingly higher likelihood of attaining a top executive role in finance than in non‐finance. Within finance it is no longer investment banking, but private equity, that contains the highest proportion of elite university graduates. Our findings suggest that notwithstanding the major power shifts between finance and non‐finance—and also within the finance sector—elite groups still dominate the most symbolically valued education, and as a result, top managerial positions.

A data analytics approach for university competitiveness: the QS world university rankings

In recent years, higher education has felt pressured to prepare its graduates for the highly competitive international market due to globalization. Thus, many institutions have turned to position themselves well in university rankings as a way to attract the best academic and student talent from all over the world. Our work presents a predictive model for measuring university performance in the QS world university rankings (QS-WUR). We used a ten-year dataset to build models with statistical and machine learning algorithms contained in the library Caret of the RStudio software tool, to forecast global university position in QS-WUR. With these tools, we designed a methodology to predict the university partners' Final Scores based on their historical performance, achieving errors in the range of one or two points out of 100. The modelling may be a useful aid for university officers to develop strategies for improving institutional processes to attract the best students, faculty, and funding, enhance international collaboration and outlook, and foster international university prestige.

The Role of Early-Career University Prestige Stratification on the Future Academic Performance of Scholars

This paper investigates the effect of university prestige stratification on scholars’ career achievements. We focus on 766 STEM PhD graduates hired by Mexican universities between 1992 and 2016. We rank university according to their prestige based on the pairwise assessment of quality contained in the PhD hiring networks. Further, we use a quasi-experimental design matching pairs of individuals with the same characteristics, PhD training or first job experience. Our results challenge the positive association between prestige and academic performance as predicted by the ‘Matthew effect’. Scholars hired internally sustain higher performance over their careers in comparison to those who move up or down the prestige hierarchy. Further, we find a positive (negative) relation between downward (upward) prestige mobility and performance that relates to the “big-fish-little-pond” effect (BFLPE). The evidence of a BFLPE-like effect has policy implications because hinders the knowledge flows throughout the science system and individual achievements.

Investigation of Employability Perceptions of Sports Science Students

This study, which was conducted to examine the employability perceptions of students studying in the field of sports sciences in terms of gender, department, type of university, work in the field of diploma and level of foreign language knowledge, was designed according to correlational survey and causal comparison methods. In determining the sample of the study, accessible sampling method, which is one of the non-random sampling methods, was used. The sample in question consists of a total of 206 participants, 99 females (48.1%) and 107 males (51.9%). As a measurement tool the “Employability Perception Scale” (IEAS) developed by Rothwell et al. (2008) and adapted into Turkish by Karlı (2016), was used in the study. According to the results of the analysis, a significant difference was determined in terms of gender variable in the University Prestige sub-dimension (p &lt; 0.05). No significant difference was determined in terms of other sub-dimensions and variables. As a result, it is possible to state that the employability perception of the students studying in the field of sports sciences is high, that the female participants perceive their university as more prestigious than the male participants, and this contributes positively to their belief that they can be employed in this situation.

Connected audiences in digital media markets: The dynamics of university online video impact

This paper analyses whether the audience dynamics of one content provider can explain the audience dynamics of a different content provider, and the resulting network of connections among providers. The type of connections in this network determines whether the audience of one creator influences or is susceptible to other creators’ audience. Granger causality networks are applied to prestigious universities that provide online videos on YouTube and the structure of the Audience Dynamics Network is described. This network presents an unbalanced degree distribution and a core-periphery structure. The centrality of the universities in the network is discussed and universities with influential and susceptible roles are identified. We find that audience connection is determined by the differences in the online video impact between each pair of universities. Centrality in the network is associated with university prestige, but this relation is mediated by online video impact.

Institutional prestige, academic supervision and research productivity of international PhD students: Evidence from Chinese returnees

Since the emergence of global university rankings in the 2000s, East Asian universities have been recruiting academics with doctoral degrees from Western countries to strengthen their competitiveness in the global university league tables. Governments offer scholarships to support students in their overseas doctoral studies and encourage graduates to return. Although much attention is given to researchers with overseas degrees, little is known about their experiences and pre-employment academic productivity. Drawing on a nationwide survey and bibliometric data, this study examines whether and how the institutional prestige of a host university and academic supervision contribute to the academic productivity of government-funded Chinese PhD returnees during their doctoral studies. Results show that supervisors’ research support and collaboration positively affect pre-employment academic productivity. However, a university's prestige does not exert such an influence. Moreover, co-authorship with a supervisor is a crucial mechanism in the influence of supervisors’ research support on PhD students’ productivity.

University prestige, cultural distance of the place of education, and wage differences between high-skilled U.S. immigrants with foreign and domestic credentials

We examine the reasons behind a wage penalty that is applied to foreign-educated immigrants—a phenomenon identified across countries and levels of educational attainment. The lower wages employers offer to high-skilled immigrants are usually attributed to the foreignness of their educational credentials. We argue instead that their disadvantaged economic outcomes are related to the educational prestige of their universities and the cultural distance of their places of education. Employers may interpret signals of ability from the educational prestige associated with credentials and may view immigrants as lacking relevant cultural competence if they perceive the place of education as culturally distant. Using data from the U.S. H-1B visa program, we show that employers do not discount wage offers to immigrants with foreign degrees per se. Instead, we find that they offer lower wages to immigrants with educational credentials from less prestigious universities and more culturally distant places of education.