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Author: Alex Usher

Dutch Higher Education at a Crossroads: Coalition Politics and University Futures with Marijk van der Wende

A few months ago, there was an election in the Netherlands, one in which the most seats went to was the anti-immigration Party for Freedom, or PVV led by Geert Wilders.  After a few months of coalition negotiations between parties (something that is largely unknown in the anglosphere but is pretty common in Europe), a new governing majority was created that collectively agreed to a new set of priorities.  One of those priorities?  Cutting the living daylights out of funding

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October 10, 2024 No Comments

Estimating Employment in the Higher Education Sector

For many years, I have been making the point that Canada has very little good data on employment in the higher education sector. We have a national annual tally, based on administrative data, of ranked academic faculty in universities from a system called UCASS, or the University and College Academic Staff Survey (don’t let the title fool you, it’s really only universities). Beyond that—data on non-academic staff, or any national data at all on colleges—is basically bupkis. Except, that’s not

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October 9, 2024 1 Comment

British Columbia Election Manifesto Analysis, 2024

British Columbia goes to the polls on October 19th, and so it’s time to take a look at what the parties are saying about universities, colleges, and students. You’re about to get a lot of these because we have three provincial elections going on simultaneously (New Brunswick votes on the 21st and Saskatchewan on the 29th). Warning, though: This might be the simplest election platform analysis I’ve ever done because there’s just so little on offer. Let’s start with the

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October 8, 2024 1 Comment

Some Notes on Global Funding of Higher Education

This blog post is adapted from a presentation I gave last week at the European Universities’ Association’s Funding Forum in Helsinki. My colleague on the panel, Enora Pruvot, was tasked with summarizing funding trends from the perspective of European institutions; mine was to zero in on the world’s 11 biggest spenders on tertiary education outside Europe, which is why you won’t see data in here on places like France, Germany, the UK, or Spain. (Why eleven? It was supposed to

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October 7, 2024 No Comments

Centers for Teaching and Learning with Mary C. Wright

One of the many ironies about universities are its hiring processes. Universities need good teachers, and so of course they find the best researchers to fill those jobs. It was an understanding of the problematic nature of this approach that led to the creation of various activities in universities designed to assist professors in developing their craft as teachers. This in turn led to a more sophisticated understanding of teaching as merely the complement of learning, and from there it

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October 3, 2024 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.

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