Review of higher education/˜The œreview of higher education

About Review of higher education/˜The œreview of higher education

The Review of Higher Education: The Scholarly Journal of the Association for the Study of Higher Education

The Review of Higher Education (RHE) is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of colleges and universities, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in Baltimore, Maryland, as the official journal of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). The Journals World record for this post lists the print ISSN 0162-5748 and the online ISSN 1090-7009 and names Johns Hopkins University Press as publisher; both details agree with the journal's official listings and with its standard bibliographic record. For close to five decades the Review has been one of the small number of generalist journals that define the field of higher education studies in the United States and internationally — a venue where research on students, faculty, administrators, governance, finance, policy and campus culture appears side by side, held together by an insistence on systematic, critical inquiry with practical implications. This profile sets out the journal's history and ownership, its scope and article types, its publishing model including the recent Subscribe to Open experiment, its indexing and measured standing, and practical guidance for authors, including an important warning that the journal itself issues about fraudulent submission sites.

Bibliographic Identity

The journal's standard abbreviation is Rev. High. Educ. under ISO 4. Its bibliographic record, as summarised in its standard reference entry, gives the discipline as Education, the language as English, the publisher as Johns Hopkins University Press in the United States, the frequency as quarterly, and the OCLC number as 35451211. Issues appear in September, December, March and June, following the rhythm of the North American academic year. The print ISSN 0162-5748 and electronic ISSN 1090-7009 on the Journals World record match the ISSN pair in the journal's own and its publisher's listings exactly; there is no discrepancy to resolve on identifiers. The title as registered is The Review of Higher Education; the Journals World post title drops the initial article and carries legacy encoding artefacts from an earlier import, but the slug, ISSNs and publisher together leave no doubt about which journal the record represents. A second, clean-slug post for the same journal exists elsewhere on this site with identical ISSNs; that pair is flagged in the accompanying worker report as a duplicate for the site's merge queue, and readers should treat the two records as one journal.

History and the ASHE Relationship

ASHE describes the journal as advancing the study of higher education since 1977, while the journal's standard reference entry dates its founding to 1978, with publication history running 1978 to the present. The one-year difference is the familiar gap between a journal's organisational founding and the appearance of its first volume, and both dates are reported here with their sources so that readers can see why catalogues differ. What is not in dispute is the journal's role: from its first volumes it served as the scholarly publication of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the principal professional association for scholars who study postsecondary education as an organisational, social and policy phenomenon. ASHE's own description of the journal states that it publishes peer-reviewed research studies, scholarly essays and theoretically driven reviews addressing issues and questions of importance to students, faculty, administrators and policymakers, and that it emphasises systematic and critical inquiry and practical implications. That four-part audience — students, faculty, administrators, policymakers — is written into the journal's identity and explains its editorial taste: work published in the Review is expected to matter beyond the seminar room.

Through the association, the journal is embedded in the field's annual scholarly conversation: ASHE's annual conference is where much of the research that later appears in the Review is first presented and debated, and the journal's editorial leadership is drawn from the field's senior scholars. The publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, is one of the oldest university presses in the United States and operates its journals division from 2715 North Charles Street in Baltimore, an address that appears on the journal's bibliographic record. Distribution and digital access are handled substantially through Project MUSE, the press's aggregated platform for humanities and social science journals, where the journal's contents are available to subscribing libraries and, under the arrangement described below, increasingly to all readers.

Scope: What the Review Publishes

The Review is a generalist journal of higher education studies. Its pages carry empirical research studies using quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods; scholarly essays that develop arguments about the purposes and politics of postsecondary education; and theoretically driven reviews that organise a literature and move it forward. Recurring subject matter includes student access, persistence and outcomes; faculty work and academic careers; organisational behaviour, governance and leadership in colleges and universities; state and federal policy; finance and resource allocation; diversity, equity and inclusion on campus; graduate and professional education; community colleges and minority-serving institutions; and the external environment of higher education, from demographic change to public trust. A manuscript does not need to cover several of these at once — most articles work deeply on one — but it does need to speak to the field as a whole rather than to a single campus, and to draw out implications that a reader in a different institutional context can use.

A notable recent development recorded by ASHE is a dedicated section titled Liberatory Possibilities and Praxis, which amplifies scholarship advancing liberatory possibilities through frameworks, methodologies, analytic approaches and discussions that centre epistemic justice within higher education. The creation of a named section signals an editorial commitment that authors working in critical, decolonial, feminist, critical-race and related traditions should read as an explicit invitation, with the section's framing on the ASHE journal page giving the most current statement of what the editors seek. Authors considering the section should study recently published contributions in it before submitting, because section expectations supplement, rather than replace, the journal's general standards of rigour.

Publishing Model: Subscribe to Open, 2025–2027

ASHE announces that The Review of Higher Education is operating under a Subscribe to Open (S2O) model for 2025–2027. Under S2O, libraries continue to subscribe as before; if the subscription threshold for a year is met, that year's content is made open to the public rather than held behind the subscription wall. ASHE reports that the threshold was met for 2025, so content published in the 2025 calendar year is openly available, and that the three-year arrangement also covers articles in the journal's Ahead of Print section. Each year of the arrangement is decided by whether subscriptions reach the threshold for that year. For authors, the practical significance is considerable: publication in the Review during this window can deliver open-access reach — with the visibility and citation advantages that follow — without any article processing charge to the author, provided the annual threshold continues to be met. For librarians and readers, it means the open status of a given volume should be checked on the publisher's platform rather than assumed in either direction. The S2O experiment also places the Review in a small group of established society journals testing collective funding models as an alternative to author-pays open access.

No Submission Fee — and the Journal's Own Fraud Warning

ASHE states plainly, on the journal's official association page, that The Review of Higher Education does not require potential contributors to pay an article submission fee in order to be considered for publication, and it identifies the official site for submissions as the journal's author-guidelines page on the Johns Hopkins University Press website. The same notice warns that any other website purporting to be affiliated with the journal and requiring payment of a submission fee is fraudulent, and asks authors who encounter such a site not to provide payment information and instead to contact the editorial office or the journal's publisher at the press. This warning deserves prominence in any directory profile, because impersonation of established journals by fee-collecting clone sites is a documented harm to researchers, particularly those publishing internationally for the first time. The verified routes are the press's journal page, the ASHE journal page, and the editorial team's address at rhe@ashe.ws for questions. Any other channel demanding money in this journal's name should be reported, not paid.

Indexing and Measured Standing

The journal is indexed in Scopus and in the Social Sciences Citation Index within the Web of Science Core Collection, and it is discoverable through JSTOR and Project MUSE; its standard reference entry lists Scopus among its indexing services. The Journals World record itself carries an h-index of 85 for the journal, and independent Scopus-based compilations consulted for this profile agree closely: one current aggregator listing gives a Scopus CiteScore of 3.5, coverage from 1996 to 2025, an h-index of 85, an SJR of 0.812 and a first-quartile (Q1) placement in Education. Journal Citation Reports figures move annually; aggregator summaries of the most recent JCR cycle place the journal's impact factor in the region of 2.5, while a 2024 metrics compilation listed 2.90 — both figures are given here with their provenance because a single unattributed number would misrepresent a moving quantity. The stable facts are the quartile and the depth of the citation record: a field journal with fifty years of continuous publication, an h-index in the mid-eighties and consistent Q1 standing in Education is, by any provider's arithmetic, one of the leading generalist journals of higher education research. Circulation figures in the journal's older reference summary — about 2,058, with an average issue length of about 104 pages — describe the print-era journal and are included as historical colour, not as current data.

Editorial Practice and Peer Review

The journal is peer reviewed, as ASHE's description confirms, and it is published under the editorial governance of the association with Johns Hopkins University Press as publisher. Editorial correspondence goes to the RHE editorial team at the association address given above. Because the composition of editorial boards changes on a cycle, this profile deliberately does not freeze a list of named editors; the current masthead is published by the press and the association and should be consulted directly. What can be said durably about editorial practice follows from the journal's stated standards: manuscripts are expected to show systematic and critical inquiry, a clear theoretical or conceptual framing where the genre calls for it, methodological transparency appropriate to the tradition used, and an explicit account of implications for practice or policy. Review essays must be genuinely synthetic and argumentative rather than annotated bibliographies. Essays must make a scholarly contribution, not merely a topical one. These are demanding standards, and they explain both the journal's standing and the care with which a submission should be prepared.

Guidance for Authors

Authors preparing a submission should begin from the journal's author guidelines on the Johns Hopkins University Press website, which ASHE identifies as the official route, and from the ASHE journal page, which carries the current scope statement, the Liberatory Possibilities and Praxis framing and the Subscribe to Open notice. Five practical points follow from the verified record. First, pay no submission fee to anyone: the journal charges none, and a demand for one is the journal's own stated marker of a fraudulent site. Second, frame for the four audiences — students, faculty, administrators and policymakers are all named in the journal's mission, and an implications discussion that speaks to at least two of them will fit the journal better than a purely intra-scholarly one. Third, if the work belongs in the Liberatory Possibilities and Praxis section, say so in the cover communication and write to the section's stated aims. Fourth, consider timing in relation to the S2O window: publication during 2025–2027 may carry open-access visibility at no author cost if thresholds are met, which is worth a great deal for work aimed at practitioners and policymakers outside subscribing libraries. Fifth, expect the standards of a flagship association journal: situate the study in the field's literature — including, where relevant, the Review's own back catalogue — and make the contribution claim precise. Queries before submission can be directed to the editorial team at rhe@ashe.ws.

The Review's Place in the Field's Journal Ecology

Higher education studies supports a family of journals, and the Review's position within it is distinctive. Alongside it stand the Journal of Higher Education, the field's other long-established generalist title; Research in Higher Education, associated with the Association for Institutional Research and weighted toward empirical and institutional-research contributions; the Review of Educational Research, which publishes integrative reviews across all of education rather than higher education specifically; and a ring of specialised titles devoted to community colleges, student affairs, Hispanic-serving institutions, Black education, and other defined communities and questions. Within that ecology, the Review is the association journal of ASHE and the venue most closely identified with the scholarly identity of the field itself — the place where the field argues about its own concepts, theories and directions, as well as about colleges and universities as objects. Its willingness to publish scholarly essays and theoretically driven reviews, alongside conventional research reports, gives it a discursive range that purely empirical outlets do not attempt. For tenure and promotion committees, publication in the Review is conventionally read as evidence that a scholar's work speaks to the whole field, and the journal's Q1 standing in Education, recorded in the metrics section above, formalises that reputation in the bibliometric terms universities increasingly use. None of this makes the journal the right home for every good manuscript: tightly technical institutional-research studies, single-programme evaluations without wider significance, and work addressed wholly to another discipline's conversation will usually fit a neighbouring title better, and the editors' scope statement is the correct first test.

What Five Decades of Publication Show

A journal published continuously since the late 1970s becomes, among other things, an archive of its field's changing preoccupations. The Review's back catalogue tracks the expansion of American higher education research from an early focus on governance, academic organisation and student development, through the finance- and accountability-driven decades, to contemporary concerns with equity and epistemic justice, demographic contraction, graduate education, and the legitimacy of universities in a sceptical political climate. The creation of the Liberatory Possibilities and Praxis section, described earlier in this profile, is the most recent editorial marker of that evolution: a journal founded to serve systematic inquiry now formally reserves space for scholarship that questions whose knowledge the inquiry has centred. Researchers preparing literature reviews can exploit this archive deliberately — searching the journal across decades shows not only what conclusions were reached but when particular questions became askable, which is itself evidence about the field. The Ahead of Print flow on the publisher's platform, now folded into the Subscribe to Open arrangement, means that archive is also current: the conversation an author joins on submission is visible in near-real time, and citing it accurately is part of demonstrating the field awareness the journal expects.

Reading and Using the Journal

For readers, the Review functions as the field's quarterly stocktaking. A graduate student entering higher education studies can read a year of the journal and acquire a working map of what the field currently argues about; a provost or policy analyst can read it for evidence that has survived peer review in a venue with no commercial interest in the findings; a faculty researcher can use its review essays to enter a neighbouring literature quickly. Access is through Project MUSE and library subscriptions, with 2025 content open under the S2O arrangement described above and Ahead of Print articles posted in advance of issue assignment. When citing, use the journal's full title or its ISO 4 abbreviation Rev. High. Educ., the print ISSN 0162-5748 or electronic ISSN 1090-7009 as appropriate to the version consulted, and the volume and issue from the publisher's platform. Directory information, including this profile, should always yield to the press and association pages where they differ, because those pages — checked for this profile in October 2026 — are where the journal speaks for itself.