Abstract
More than doubling the number of institutions in the last decade, the Turkish higher education system has displayed highly contradictory conditions for developing the teaching and research nexus (T-R-N). While Turkey has been posited among research-focused systems, academics have found themselves in a work environment heavily teaching-loaded. Here, rather than focusing only on the national structure, a multinational comparison can assist to better understand the outcomes of the rapid expansion and research-focused trends in terms of potential contradictions regarding the T-R-N in Turkish academia. Therefore, this research examines the T-R-N perceptions of academics and the influence of personal, professional, and institutional characteristics on their perceptions comparing Turkey with the Eastern and Western case countries. This research was designed in the cross-national survey model. Adding the data of Germany and South Korea through the Academic Profession in Knowledge-based Society (APIKS) survey, the T-R-N approaches in these three countries were compared using cross-tabulation with chi-square tests and binary logistic regression. The analyses revealed that gender, career level, discipline, teaching/research preferences, and teaching time spent are the influential factors for the T-R-N perceptions and implementations of academics in the case countries, while “Research and Development (R&D) spending per academic staff” is the prominent factor at the national level comparisons.
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Notes
- 1.
In Turkey, vocational schools are mostly parts of universities, except these four “private vocational schools.” Yet each vocational school provides “short-cycle tertiary education” (for 2 years) at the ISCED 5 level (code 55, vocational education) (ISCED, 2011).
- 2.
In line with the definition of the European Higher Education Area, associate and bachelor’s degrees are the first cycle, master’s programs the second cycle, and doctoral programs the third cycle of HE (https://www.ehea.info/page-three-cycle-system).
- 3.
In 2017/2018: Germany had 215 “university of applied sciences [Fachhochschulen],” including 93 private institutions (https://www.destatis.de/); South Korea had 138 junior colleges, including 129 private ones (https://kess.kedi.re.kr/); Turkey had only 4 private vocational colleges (https://www.yok.gov.tr/universiteler/universitelerimiz).
- 4.
In 2017/2018: the ratio of master’s degrees was 28.2% and of doctorate degree 5.5% in the total number of HE students in Germany (https://www.destatis.de/); the ratio of graduate students (including both master’s and doctoral programs) was 9.5% in South Korea (https://kess.kedi.re.kr/); the ratio of master’s and PhD students was 7.27% in Turkey (https://istatistik.yok.gov.tr).
- 5.
The categories consist of “senior (occupying professorial roles) (e.g., including W3, W2, and W1 Junior professorship in Germany and full, associate, and assistant professorship in Turkey and South Korea)” and “junior (the others).”
- 6.
720,000 Turkish Lira maximum (https://www.tubitak.gov.tr/en/funds/academy/national-support-programmes/content-1001-the-scientific-and-technological-research-projects-funding-program), calculated at the exchange rate of 1 US $ = 8.0037 Turkish Lira on March 26, 2021, the deadline for the spring term of the TÜBİTAK-1001 program (https://www.tcmb.gov.tr/kurlar/kurlar_tr.html).
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Acknowledgments
The APIKS Research was supported by TÜBİTAK (Project No: 117 K917) and COMU-BAP (Project No: SBA-2017-1093) in Turkey.
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Uslu, B. (2022). Teaching and Research Nexus in the Turkish Higher Education System: Comparative Perspectives with Eastern and Western Examples. In: Huang, F., Aarrevaara, T., Teichler, U. (eds) Teaching and Research in the Knowledge-Based Society. The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04439-7_12
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