The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Tag: Prestige

Because it’s 2023

Morning everyone and welcome back.  I want to alert everyone to a bit of a shift in the way the team here at HESA Towers is handling the blog.  As you know, we have been trialing a podcast these last few weeks (there’s a great one with Alma Maldonado-Maldonado of Mexico’s CINEVSTAV this Thursday).  Later this month, the podcast format will change a bit and become a regular weekly feature focusing specifically on global higher education.  The regular blog will

Read More »
January 9, 2023 2 Comments

Short Courses and Continuing Education

A few weeks ago, Statistics Canada released a paper profiling graduates of community colleges who already held bachelor’s degrees.  A significant number of these were graduates of foreign universities – immigrants who came to the country with a degree and then found they needed a Canadian credential.  But there were also a substantial number – fully 8% of all college graduates – who already had a degree from a Canadian university.  In the 1990s, when colleges first started pointing out this

Read More »
May 11, 2021 1 Comment

Two Great Books on Admissions

An important shift during the last half-decade or so in US higher education is the serious consideration that increased selectivity at the top 5-10% of institutions may be doing real damage to the goal of social mobility.  It’s not just data nerds like Raj Chetty doing big data projects on outcomes: it’s becoming a topic of national conversation.  If you want to learn more about it in detail, you couldn’t do better than two new books: Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets in and

Read More »
September 17, 2020 No Comments

Competition, Markets and the Persistence of Hegemonic Institutions

Competition metaphors abound in higher education.  We talk about competition for students, competition for academics.  Since the introduction of rankings – particularly the global ones about fifteen years ago – we talk about “moving up the tables”, in a squash-ladder kind of way. (There are some sumo metaphors with which I could regale you here but using my incredible powers of self-control, I will spare you, even though the Kyushu basho is currently bumming me out, what with all the top dudes

Read More »
November 19, 2019 2 Comments

Superstar Theory and Why Higher Education is Different

I spent part of this weekend reading Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life, by the late Princeton Economist Alan Krueger (whose work on higher education I highlighted here when he died by suicide earlier this year).  It’s not a bad little book, part inside-baseball on the music industry, part using examples from the music industry to explain certain features of the wider economy.  But one chapter in particular got me thinking

Read More »
November 4, 2019 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...