Tag: New Zealand

Incremental Change or System Overhaul? An Update on Higher Ed Reform in NZ with Roger Smyth

In some countries, higher education policy just seems to sit still for decades. In others, hyperactivity is a more normal state. Today we’re looking at the 2020s poster child for higher education hyperactivity. It’s not the usual suspects, the UK or Australia, it’s little New Zealand where we’re making our fourth stop on this podcast in just over two and a half years. When last we were in Wellington, we talked to Chris Whelan from Universities New Zealand about university

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The University Advisory Group: Reimagining New Zealand’s Higher Ed Future with Chris Whelan

We live in a time when governments seem to have few ideas about how to manage massified higher education systems. One playbook in this situation, often used in the UK and Australia, is to punt the question to a group of experts in hope that they might find some policies to make higher education more useful, productive, and, let’s face it, cheaper. Today we’re going to take you to Wellington, New Zealand, where the new government, led by the National

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The Jacinda Ardern Legacy

It’s Thursday, and that means it’s time for episode 2 of The World of Higher Education podcast.  Today my guest is Dave Guerin, Chief Executive and Editor-in-Chief of Tertiary Insight, a higher education news service based in Wellington.  Our subject: the higher education record of recently resigned New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Ardern came to power promising to eliminate tuition fees over the course of three terms in office, only to reverse course after one term, with the promise

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Cross-National Student Loan Repayment Comparisons

As I mentioned yesterday,  there was a big change in US student loan policy last week, namely with respect to income-based repayment.  As I see it, the new rules make it one of the least onerous places in the world in which to repay student loans, by some standards.  But before I substantiate this claim, I need to discuss how student loan repayments work around the world. Trying to compare loan burdens across national borders can be tricky because the

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Global Higher Education’s Post-COVID Future (3) – New Pedagogies, New Credentials

On Monday, I described some of the big changes of the past 18 months; yesterday I discussed the first big future trend (“Funding Challenges Forever”), and today I want to talk about the second, which I call “New Pedagogies and New Credentials”. The experience of learning online during COVID has divided both learners and instructors.  A clear majority have a healthy dislike for it, and a few loath it.  But a significant minority enjoyed the experiment.  For students who never

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