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The purpose of this paper is to explore how the graduate assistants (GAs) are inducted into the system and ethos of the institutions of higher education (IHE) in Eritrea. The paper serves in the purpose of creating more conducive and supportive work environment in IHE facilitating the socialization of junior faculty members to the culture, standards and system of the institutions.

The research adhered a combined approach of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Data were gathered through a Likert scale questionnaire and in-depth interviews. The study was conducted in seven IHE involving 165 participants.

The GAs’ knowledge of job description, access to institutional information, sharing of resources, the quality of guidance and support provided, supervised teaching and feedback are discussed in detail. Results revealed that the GAs shoulder vital responsibilities but they receive poor induction at individual and institutional levels. GAs complain for lack of job description clarity and lack of transparent institutional communication at work. Holding first degree, GAs teach senior courses without any prior induction, pedagogic trainings and unsupervised. The GAs are recruited on the basis of the colleges’ long-term staff development plan, but little is done.

Despite their academic rank, the GAs represent 64 percent of the national academic staff (ADF, 2010). Creating conducive work atmosphere for the junior faculty members in the institutions is a long-term investment on institutional capacity building and quality assurance of the institutions’ performance.

Induction of the newly recruited junior faculty members to the social, professional and the institutional ethos is a socialization process that would minimize the professional isolation and inefficiency of new recruits.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as contribute to the range and diversity of ideas toward innovations and solutions to the greatest engineering challenges. This study aims to examine the association among gender, family formation and post-PhD employment patterns of a cohort of engineering doctorates.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients data, 2001–2010, descriptive and multinomial logit regression analyses are conducted to illustrate the career trajectories of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period.

The career trajectories of engineering PhDs are nonlinear, and transitions between employment sectors commonly occur over the ten-year time period studied. Although women engineering PhDs with young dependents are less likely to be employed initially after PhD completion, they tend to enter the workforce in the academic sector as time progresses. Early post-PhD employment as a postdoctoral researcher or in the academic sector contributes to the pursuit of the professoriate downstream.

While previous studies tend to focus on the early career outcomes of science and engineering students, this study contributes to the literature by focusing on the long-term career outcomes of engineering doctorates. Research findings provide engineering PhD students and PhDs with more information regarding potential post-PhD career trajectories, highlighting the multitude of career options and transitions that occur over time. Research findings also provide higher education administrators and doctoral program stakeholders with foundational information toward designing and revitalizing professional development programs to help PhD students prepare for the workforce. The findings have the potential to be applied toward helping increase diversity by shaping policies and programs to encourage multiple alternative career pathways to the professoriate.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate branding and higher education literature to conceptualize, develop, and empirically examine a model of university social augmenters’ brand equity.

Drawing on an empirical survey of 401 undergraduate students enrolled in private universities in Egypt, this study model was tested using structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that university social augmenters’ reputation, coach-to-student interactions, and student-to-student interactions influence students’ satisfaction with social augmenters. The results also suggest that students satisfied with university social augmenters are more likely to exhibit outcomes of brand equity – namely, brand identification, willingness to recommend, and willingness to incur an additional premium cost.

The results offer managerial implications for university administrators in their quest to enrich students’ university experiences and build strong sub-brands within the university setting. University social augmenters are found to have strong brand equity manifestations and may hold the potential to differentiate university brands in an industry dominated by experience and credence.

This research contributes to the extant literature by filling two gaps in university branding literature. First, previous research has never unified separate streams of literature related to augmented services and brand equity. Second, limited conceptual and empirical research on university branding in general and university social augmentation in particular has been conducted in emerging markets, which has resulted in conceptual ambiguity for the key factors constructing students’ university social experiences.