Professor Hayhoe received a BA in Classics from the University of Toronto (1967), and MA and PhD degrees in Comparative Education from the University of London Institute of Education (1978 and 1984). She also has a Certificate in Education from the University of Hong Kong (1975) and a Diploma of Theology from the University of London (1978).

Ruth's research has mainly related to Chinese higher education and educational relations between East Asia and the West. She has been interested in the ways in which cultural values and epistemologies from Eastern civilizations may provide a resource for new thinking in global higher education development. She is also interested in the intersection between Asian ways of knowing and women's ways of knowing, and questions of gender in cross-cultural leadership, topics stimulated by her personal experience of institutional leadership in an Asian context.

Ruth completed a study of the lives and ideas of eleven influential Chinese educators in 2005, developing a set of Portraits which illustrate the continuing value of the Confucian educational heritage. In 2011 she completed a parallel study of China's universities in the move to mass higher education, developing portraits of 12 Chinese universities of different types in different regions of China, as they evolved over the massification process. Since then she has launched a study of Canada-China university linkages supported by the Canadian International Development Agency and their contribution to China's dramatic transformation over recent decades.