If you’ve been reading this bog for a while, you’ll know that I occasionally keep tabs on what’s going on at some of China’s top universities. I haven’t done it in a couple of years or so, so I thought it was time for an update. Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the C9 League of universities—that is, the Chinese equivalent of Canada’s U15, only even more elite—minus the
When it comes to higher education systems, few countries can match South Korea for its sheer dynamism. From its explosive growth to meet “Education Fever” in the 1980s and 1990s, to its astonishing run-up in research output in the 90s and 2000s, to its policy innovations like the self-study degree and the Academic Credit Bank, it’s always been a system to watch. However, as Korea got rich, it also began to shrink. The birthrate fell precipitously to the point where
Note: This blog is adapted from a talk I gave to the U21 Network’s COO Network yesterday at McMaster University There has been a lot happening lately in the world of student mobility and international mobility. Seems like a good time to take a minute and look at the big picture. Let’s start on the side of the “sending” countries. Data for China in the last couple of years is pretty spotty—a lot of the “information” you see comes from surveys conducted
A lot of people have been speculating about what’s going to happen in the Ontario College sector now that its use of the money-printing machine of ever-increasing international student numbers has been shut off. Some have speculated about Laurentian-style bankruptcies. I think that’s extraordinarily unlikely given the way this is playing out. I do think some significant changes—sometimes quite deleterious ones—are going to occur in Ontario post-secondary. It’s just that it’s going to happen at the level of individual programs,
When you think about big, visionary ideas in higher education, an abnormal number of them over the past few decades have comes from Europe. The Erasmus Program. The Bologna Process. Diploma Supplements. An effort-based credit system. Tuning. Challenge-based research competitions. European University Alliances. European Degrees. And while these ideas have many sources, an abnormally high proportion of them comes from one place: the City of Brussels and the supra-national European Commission which resides there. At a certain level, this is
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